


Survey of Optical and Orbital Mechanics

by jeffwik (Portioncontrol)



Series: Remedial Learning! [2]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Bechdel Test Fail, Canon Divergent, Denver International Airport, Dramatic lighting, F/M, Gen, Mistaken Identity, Season/Series 03, Thwarted attempt at door-kicking, banana daiquiris, ice cream cake, stuffed animals, suspicion of secret dating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27545524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Portioncontrol/pseuds/jeffwik
Summary: One time Chang used an army of child soldiers to take the dean of the school hostage and replace him with a lookalike. What a comedy!
Relationships: Annie Edison/Jeff Winger, Troy Barnes/Britta Perry
Series: Remedial Learning! [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2013475
Comments: 50
Kudos: 65





	1. In the House of the Smiling Pineapple

Jeff had honestly thought it wasn't going to happen. Firstly, it had been a plan made in idle jest while one of them was more than a little drunk. He'd assumed Annie had forgotten about it immediately, until she reminded him the Monday after. Secondly, when the day actually came they all had bigger problems.

But while their expulsion from Greendale Community College was a major issue, and the dean's apparent abduction and replacement with a doppleganger an even more major issue, nevertheless somehow she'd found time to locate an actual tiki bar, only about twenty minutes away. She'd even called ahead and confirmed that they had banana daiquiris on the menu. So while the rest of the group split up and approached their multitudinous Chang-related problems, Jeff and Annie were taking a night off.

She was the only one who'd remembered it was his birthday. Frankly Jeff felt a little guilty; it seemed like a waste of time, but there wasn't much they could do until Troy came back with whatever information he could wrestle out of the air-conditioning annex. And blowing off helping their friends didn't seem in-character for Annie Edison. But then again, it beat pacing around his apartment, or hers, and it definitely beat babysitting Shirley's kids.

The House of the Smiling Pineapple had once been a Ray n' Beef's Pizza Palace where Jeff had attended multiple birthday parties as a kid in the 80s, he was pretty sure. It had been the fashionable place to turn seven for a little while there, when the fashionable way to celebrate was to invite your entire second-grade class for an evening of pizza and arcade games. He hadn't had such a party himself but he'd been to other people's.

The animatronic anthropomorphic cats had all been ripped out and auctioned off years ago, of course, and the arcade was empty of machines except for the skee ball units that were built in, and those were plainly broken. But there was still an oddly-shaped little stage in one corner of the open dining room, the one where the tiki bar was set up, with a little portable karaoke machine. The various logos and wall art for the now-defunct chain of restaurant-arcades had all been painted over with crude pineapple murals. The carpet was no particular color, slightly squishy, and probably older than Jeff himself. The whole building smelled a little musty, or he might have imagined that.

But they had a liquor license and a blender, and bananas and rum and whatever else went into a banana daiquiri, so Jeff and Annie took an empty booth and ordered one each. Also a pepperoni pizza that came out almost immediately, before the drinks even, maybe because despite it being peak restaurant hours, the place was nearly empty.

"I'll cover the pizza," Jeff said, because he knew Annie was going to insist on paying for the daiquiris. She looked nice, in a dark red print dress with a black sweater over it, her hair and makeup immaculate. He’d have assumed she’d dressed up a little for him, except that she always looked good. 

As he predicted, she shook her head. "It's still your birthday. Happy birthday!" Annie exclaimed with forced cheer, and made jazz-hands.

He tried not to find it adorable. "Thank you, thank you, it's absolutely worthwhile to celebrate my having survived another year, yes, thanks." Jeff dabbed at a slice of pizza with a paper napkin in an attempt to soak up the small puddle of grease atop the layer of cheese.

"Well, it is." Annie tried to push through his sarcasm. "This time last year, you were less than halfway through your Greendale college experience, and now…"

"Now I'm not just an ex-lawyer, I'm an ex-lawyer who was expelled from the number two community college in Greendale."

"Now, you're _more_ than halfway through your Greendale college experience," she continued firmly. "This is something we'll get past. Save the dean, save the school, save our course credits."

"Sure."

"And if not, well, we can transfer to Greendale City College. That's allowed."

"I'm just imagining future job interviews. 'Well Mister Winger, this is quite a resume, I see here you attended Greendale, and oh, apparently you were expelled from Greendale and had to transfer?' As if having an unmarred Greendale degree wasn't stigma enough."

"Jeff," Annie said in a tone of admonishment. "You're overestimating the extent to which anybody who doesn't live within walking distance of Greendale knows anything about it. Before I signed up, I thought Greendale was some kind of community outreach program for at-risk teens that had run out of money in the 90s but they still ran the commercials as a joke."

The sullen teen who was technically their server came by with their drinks, finally. Actually Jeff wasn't sure she was a teenager, maybe she was just naturally awkward and surly. Whether teens were allowed to serve alcohol wasn't a legal question he knew the answer to, off the top of his head. He tried to ask for more napkins but if she heard him she pretended not to, hurrying back to the bar where she could go back to playing with her phone.

Annie held her daiquiri up and waited until Jeff clinked his against it. "Cheers!"

Jeff watched Annie fumble a little with her frozen drink and tried not to see her tall glass with straw as remotely phallic. Once he'd started to see it he couldn't un-see. He drank his own as quickly as he could without getting an ice-cream headache and tried to force himself to see her as basically the same age as their probably-teenaged server. The spunky kid-sister type who’d once ambushed him from the bushes.

"Okay,” she continued, oblivious. “I was going to say that when I found this place online there wasn't anything that screamed 'also the site is a disused… whatever you call this, pizza cat-house,' but hey, that's pretty good!" She was pointing at her drink. "What do you think?"

"It's hard to mess up," Jeff said. "But, yeah, she didn't mess it up."

"So, this time next year, when you're evaluating the year, you can remember that it started with the triumph of Annie buying you not just a banana daiquiri but a _delicious_ banana daiquiri!" She spoke so fervently Jeff couldn't help but grin.

"Do you do that? Evaluate the previous year on your birthday? This year's started pretty rocky for you."

"Sure, sure, we're expelled and Chang has taken over Greendale blah blah blah." She gestured dismissively. "But we'll get that taken care of. This year will be better than last year. Last year I moved in with the guys, and… We had a lot of fun…you know, the group did. Better than the year before, which was better than the year before that."

"Okay, okay," Jeff said, because he didn't want to drive Annie into a spiral of reminiscence. "So what's the coming year hold?"

"Once we resolve this thing?" Annie shrugged. "We'll be seniors. And then we'll get jobs, I guess. You'll be lawyering again, you'll like that. I don't know what I'll do. I should start thinking about it soon."

Jeff knew that Annie's major was Hospital Administration, which seemed fairly specific in terms of what career path it might lead to. "I'm surprised you don't have a binder full of plans drawn up already."

"I do!" She brightened slightly. "I made all these plans when I was a kid." She didn't notice his half-smile at her referring to herself as a kid in the past tense. "I had to modify them after. It was something to do in rehab."

"You sound like a normal person talking about the future," Jeff observed. "You don't sound overwhelmed with eager excitement, I mean."

Annie shrugged. "I guess I—"

"You want more? Or should I bring the check?" The teen from behind the counter had apparently decided it was time to check on them.

"I'll take a Gray Goose tonic," Jeff said, because he didn't want another banana daiquiri and Annie hadn't had more than half of hers.

"I don't know what that is," the teen said shortly. “The poster behind the bar says how to make daiquiris and pina coladas and mai tais, is all.”

"Vodka brand," he replied, pointing. "There's a bottle on the shelf."

"Whatever," the teen wandered off before Annie'd had a chance to say anything.

"Should I get another?" Annie asked, studying her drink. "Since you did?"

"Nah. We're pressing our luck as it is—"

"Guys!" And then Britta was there, of all people. She stood in front of their booth with her arms folded and her face pointy. "What are you doing here?" She looked suspiciously from Annie to Jeff and back again.

"Nothing incriminating!" Jeff snapped. "What're _you_ doing here?"

"I work here!"

"Oh," said Annie. "That makes sense."

"Yeah, I guess she has to work somewhere," Jeff agreed.

"This pizza is really greasy." Annie indicated the almost-untouched slice in front of her.

Britta nodded. "Yeah, I know. The pizza is nasty. Don’t get the pizza. Why are you here?" Her eyes widened. "Are you two secretly dating?"

"What? No, obviously!" cried Annie.

Britta blinked and tried to reassure her. “I won’t tell anybody if—“ 

“We’re friends!” Jeff and Annie chorused. He tried not to wince at a momentary flash of heartburn. 

"Friends!” Annie repeated. “And it's Jeff's thirty-third birthday!"

"It is?" Britta turned to Jeff. "Why didn't you say anything?"

He swallowed the sudden flash of guilt, because he hadn’t done anything wrong, and shrugged. "There's a lot going on. Speaking of, why are you here?"

"Are you clocking in?" guessed Annie. “I thought you were going to the thing.”

"I'm on my way over there, I'm just here to pick up my paycheck…" Britta shook her head. "I don't get why you two are here."

"When I was a kid I always wanted a birthday party here," Jeff said, "but never had one."

Annie blinked. "Really?"

Jeff nodded. "So now here we are."

“Funny coincidence,” Annie said, though her tone indicated she wasn’t so sure about it being funny ha-ha.

"You wanted a birthday party in a bar?" Britta scowled, annoyed she wasn't understanding something.

"It used to be a Ray n' Beef's," Annie said after a moment. “I think I was here once when I was little, before it closed. It might have been another location.”

"Either way, you can still see the embossed cartoon cat heads under the paint." Jeff pointed towards the barely-disguised trade dress that adorned the bar.

"Huh. I never noticed." Britta shrugged. "Well, I gotta go. Have fun, you two. Happy birthday." She turned to leave but Annie grabbed her arm.

"Wait, Britta, you work here, what food is okay to eat?"

"Huh? Uh." Britta had to think about that one. "The Chinese place at the other end of the shopping center is okay."

"I mean here. What food _here_ is okay?"

"I guess the chicken nuggets? They're basically precooked, we just microwave them.” Britta turned away, cupped her hands. “Hey! Courtney!” she called to the bar back. “I know these guys!”

“What were we talking about?” Jeff asked once Britta was out of earshot and away, which wasn’t until after Courtney had bullied her into running Jeff’s vodka tonic over to him, and then Annie sending her back to Courtney to place an order for chicken nuggets.

“I don’t remember,” Annie said with a shrug. She was finishing off her daiquiri. “When you were secretly dating Britta did you guys go on dates like this? Not that this is a date,” she added quickly.

“Ugh, no.” Jeff’s expression soured at the memory. “No, if we were alone together…” He glanced away, suddenly aware that Annie seemed to be studying his face. “We didn’t spend a lot of time together. There wasn’t hanging out.”

Annie cleared her throat awkwardly. “It’s just, she kind of leaped to a conclusion. I know, it’s Britta, but…”

“It’s Britta,” he said shortly. How to explain to her how that whole thing with Britta had been…whatever it was. He didn’t even know how to explain it to himself. It was nothing like spending time with Annie, his good friend who had gotten over her crush on him a year or so ago and whom he just liked hanging out with, with no expectation that it would ever lead to anything.

He realized she was staring at him. She looked away a moment after she saw that he’d noticed. Her expression was hard to read but she didn’t look pleased. Then she shook her head, as if dismissing a thought. “Job prospects. We were talking about job prospects.”

“Yeah, that’s a grim one for anyone with Greendale’s stink on them,” Jeff replied. “Happier topic, go. _Inspector Spacetime_? _Cougar Town_?”

“Are you going to go back to your old firm, after? Ted and those guys? One of them was named Ted, right?”

“Ted Hamlin, yeah. My boss.” Jeff sipped his drink. “I’ve been doing a little bit of work for them for a while now. Consulting, part-time, just enough to keep the lights on. I can’t appear in court, which is what I’m good at—“

“Speeches!” Annie exclaimed, sitting up and pointing at him with a grin.

“Yeah.” Jeff smiled. “God, you’re a lightweight. You’re the size of a purse dog, is why.”

“Well, I never got any chicken nuggets,” she replied, sounding a little hurt. “And I just seem tiny to you because you’re the world’s largest human. Big slab of…” To Jeff’s relief (not disappointment, definitely not disappointment) she trailed off. “But you were saying.”

“I can’t appear in court so I’m just doing scutwork. Pasting together boilerplate stuff to make briefs and contracts, mostly. I think Ted just wants me to be around so I don’t go work someplace else after I get the bar admission back.”

Annie nodded. “That seems like a good sign.”

“I don’t know that I actually want to do that, though. I…I was a good lawyer. For the kind of law that I did, I was a good lawyer. I was respected, I had friends…”

“That one guy,” Annie said, nodding.

“Exactly,” Jeff agreed, though he wasn’t sure who she meant. “But they stopped returning my calls as soon as I was disgraced. At best they’re people who might be willing to become my friends again in the future someday. They’re not here, now.”

“You have friends besides me, Jeff,” Annie assured him. “They’d be here, if… you know.”

“I know, I know.” Jeff felt like he wasn’t making the point he’d intended to. “But once all of this, Greendale, is really over, we’ve graduated from City College or whatever…will they still be my friends?”

“Of course—“

“And maybe Greendale changed me,” he continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “And there’s other work I could be doing. Something a little more meaningful.”

“Jeff!” Annie did the sit-up-and-point-and-grin thing again. “I have an idea!”

“Seriously,” he asked her, “how are you this drunk off of one probably-watery banana daiquiri?”

“I told you, I didn’t get my nugs!”

They both startled as their server (Courtney?) dropped a plate of chicken nuggets on the tabletop between them. “There you go. And here’s the check.”

“Can I—?” Jeff asked, but she was already gone.

“Also I drank it really fast,” Annie said as she picked up a chicken nugget. If Britta hadn’t told them that they were reheated from frozen in a microwave, Jeff probably would have guessed that anyway. He watched her eat with evident relish.

“I didn’t tell you my idea,” Annie said a moment later. “We should go into business together. Start a law firm.”

He chuckled. It was extremely easy to picture working professionally alongside Annie Edison. “You know actual lawyering isn’t like the way we prosecuted Todd, right?”

“I was going to say,” she nodded, “we did that and it went really well. We can do it! It’ll be fun. I’ll have to become a lawyer. Should I change my major?”

He tried not to grin, because he didn’t want to encourage her. “Annie, I think right now — while at a loose end from being expelled from Greendale, trying to cheer me up on my birthday, struggling to identify your next steps after school — it’s not a good time to decide to go to law school. Also you’re at least a little tipsy.”

“You’re right. I’ll become a paralegal.” Annie chewed on a nugget, then swallowed. “I’ll be your assistant for, like, a year, and then I’ll be your paralegal and I’ll have to do law school on the side so I can pass the bar and we can hire, I don’t know, Neil or something to do the paralegal stuff and then we’re lawyers together…”

Jeff gave up trying not to grin, she was too much fun to watch.

“That way,” she continued, “we can switch off who works and who stays home with our kids.”

There was a moment of silence. Annie ate another chicken nugget, apparently not noticing Jeff’s stunned expression.

“Kids?” he finally croaked.

“Kids?” Annie looked around. “Where? I don’t see any kids…”

“You said ‘kids,’” Jeff said slowly.

She looked confused. “Yeah, just now, repeating what you said.”

“Before that.”

“What? No. Before that I was saying we could be lawyers together. But I’m getting way ahead of myself,” she continued, staring off into space and again, not seeing Jeff’s stricken expression. “We start out, you’re the lawyer and I’m your paraprofessional legal assistant slash office manager working towards my paralegal certification.” She glanced his way, did a double take. “What? I—if you don’t want to, I mean, I was just being…”

“It’s okay,” Jeff said quickly, pushing away his shock at her...call it a momentary lapse. 

“Yeah?”

He chose his words carefully. This wasn’t a deposition; he wasn’t under oath. Still, he tried not to lie to Annie. His conscience always ate at him. Better to be judicious with which true things to say. “Much as I like the idea of turning responsibility for my career success over to you, and I do—you run a tight ship, you’d be a great paralegal—this isn’t a good time to make long-term plans.”

“Pffft.” Annie scoffed. “You can always come up with a reason not to make plans.”

“You’re right,” Jeff said. “I can.”

He smiled at her until she smiled back, and then they finished off the chicken nuggets. They were a little dry but hardly inedible.


	2. Meanwhile at the Taqueria

Troy was ten minutes early, but the man from the air-conditioning repair annex was already waiting for him. He had a half-eaten taco plate in front of him, and a glass empty but for icemelt.

“Murray, hi.” Troy flashed a quick smile as he sat down across from the repairman. “I hope you weren’t waiting long…”

“Huh? Naw, I’m good. Just wanted lunch.” Murray glanced briefly over Troy’s shoulder and visibly tensed. “This is what we’re doing, huh?”

“I just want to hear what’s going on at Greendale,” Troy assured him. “I know you guys have eyes everywhere.”

“Yeah we do,” Murray agreed. He waved to the server, a tall white guy with an ugly mustache. “Can we get some—“

“That’s fine,” Troy interrupted. “We’re fine.”

“Okay then,” Murray said slowly. “You know, when you said you wanted to talk one on one, I thought you meant, like...one on one.”

“I just didn’t want to make a big thing of it,” Troy said. “The vice-dean doesn’t need to know you were here.”

“This is a public place.”

“The vice-dean doesn’t need to know I was here,” Troy tried.

“Okay, if you say so.” Murray glanced over Troy’s shoulder again.

“I actually would like a chair,” Shirley said from behind him. 

“Really?” Troy asked, surprised. “I thought…I don’t know what I thought.”

She nodded. “I’ve been hauling Ben around in this carrier all day.”

“Do you need a hand with it?” Pierce asked her. “Abed, hold the baby.”

Abed stooped down but Shirley shooed him away. Ben was strapped into a car seat baby carrier at her feet. “It’s fine, Pierce, Abed, he’s asleep, no need to wake him…Elijah! Jordan!” Shirley called behind her towards the entrance of the restaurant, where her two older boys were watching the attract mode of an ancient Ms. Pac-Man machine. “We’re sitting down!”

Shirley, Pierce, Abed, Elijah, and Jordan all claimed an empty table next to the two-top, Jordan dragging a chair over for himself. Troy and Murray were silent until they were all seated, then Troy cleared his throat.

“The dean,” he said. “Craig Pelton.”

“Right, yeah. Now, speaking informally on behalf of the annex, we don’t have a dog in the fight between Chang and common decency. He does his thing, we do ours. Laybourne’s been clear about it, hands off the pipsqueak and his goddamn kids.”

Troy clucked his tongue and cocked his head towards Elijah and Jordan.

Murray shifted in his seat. “The pipsqueak and his gosh-darn kids, I mean.”

“So what  _ can _ you say?” Troy asked him.

“Well, I can tell you, I personally hate Chang’s guts,” Murray said, “and I hate his…rug…" He glanced at Jordan and Elijah. "Rats… Rugrats. Rugrats is a thing, right?”

“That show is for babies,” said Elijah. Shirley shushed him.

“So let me ask you...” Murray tried to get the conversation, such as it was, back on track. “How stupid is Chang? Is he—“

“Chang’s very stupid,” said Pierce, “but we already know that.” 

Abed nodded. “In fact, you just asked us about it.”

“So we know more than you,” Pierce agreed. 

“About Chang, at least,” said Abed.

“Probably about most things,” Pierce added thoughtfully. “Between the seven of us we know everything from how to make a fortune in the paper products industry, to how to sweet-talk a jury, to, uh, Annie knows a lot about puff paint and magic markers…”

“Guys!” Troy held up a hand, trying to silence his friends. “Let the man make his needlessly circuitous statements, okay? We haven’t got all day, here.”

Murray shrugged. “I mean, I could take another hour for lunch, what’s one more?”

“It’s seven o’clock at night.” Shirley furrowed her brow.

Murray shrugged again.

Troy cleared his throat. “You were talking about Chang being stupid."

“I was just asking questions,” Murray said. “Questions like, is Chang dumb enough to kidnap Pelton, replace him with a doppelgänger, and then imprison the real Pelton on campus in the central-air room under the cafeteria that the annex has a webcam on?”

“Okay, now we’re talking,” said Pierce. “Webcam, you say. Chang’s got the dean doing cam shows?”

Shirley grunted at Pierce to shut up, as Jordan pulled out a notebook and added to a list headed ‘STUFF MR. HAWTHORNE SAID (GOOGLE LATER)’.

"You know he's only doing that to annoy you," Pierce told Shirley. He winked at Jordan, who didn't meet his eye.

Troy leaned forward. “There’s a webcam? Can we see it?”

“Can we show it to the police, you mean,” said Shirley.

Murray frowned and shook his head. “Outsiders aren't supposed to see the annex’s intranet…here.” He pulled a smartphone from a pocket of his gray jumpsuit, fiddled with it a moment, and flashed Troy a glimpse of low-resolution footage of someone who looked like the dean playing shirtless with a plainly homemade large-foreheaded doll. The doll was also shirtless.

“Ah ah ah!” Murray pulled the smartphone back as Troy reached for it. “Annex eyes only. I shouldn’t even be telling you this, but, you know, you’re the messiah.”

“Wait, what?” Troy asked, nonplussed.

“Oh, right. You don’t…never mind,” Murray told him. “Never mind.”

“When you say ‘messiah,’ what do you mean, exactly?” Pierce asked.

Shirley cleared her throat again and muttered, “Only one messiah.”

"Never mind, I said!"

“Okay, moving on,” Troy said, unwilling to go down another rabbit hole. “The dean’s in the cafeteria basement. Let’s focus on that.”

“Well, great,” Pierce said. “Now we know where the dean is. We just have to walk in and get him, right?”

“Wrong!” Murray said gleefully. “Ha, I always wanted to answer somebody’s rhetorical question ending in ‘right?’ with ‘ _ wrong _ ’!” He chuckled. “Chang’s got all those guards, the kids. There’s like six dozen of them. You have, no offense, two.”

Shirley scowled. “I’m not going to send my boys in to fight Chang’s child army! Not when they’re outnumbered fifty to one!”

“More like seventy-two to two,” Abed observed. "Six dozen isn't fifty."

"I knew that," snapped Shirley. "But it doesn't matter."

“No, no, Abed is right. Those are better odds,” agreed Pierce. “Plus the baby, don’t forget him. That makes it, uh, thirty to one? Ish?”

Elijah and Jordan exchanged glances, silently weighing whether they could each take on thirty of their peers, and nodded thoughtfully. “If Benny takes fifteen…”

“No,” Shirley told them firmly.

“Guys!” Troy barked, then turned back to Murray. “Okay. He’s got perimeter security and his private army, is there anything else—“

“Plenty!” Murray laughed, as if to say, ‘the sheer volume of material you have overlooked is comical to me.’ “There’s a keypad on the door down to the basement. An MR16 Steranko security lock pad. Chang had us install it last week.”

“So you know the code.”

“So we know that the code changes every twenty-four hours according to an elaborate algorithm programmed into a dongle Chang keeps locked in his office.”

Pierce made a shocked noise. “Sir! There are children present!” Jordan was already adding ‘dongle’ to his Google list.

“‘Dongle’ is the generic term for a piece of electronics that can plug into a computer port,” Murray said in a slightly aggrieved tone. “You can also say ‘stick’ or ‘key,’ if you like being wrong. The MR16 dongle has a display on it that shows the current passcode for the keypad when you enter the dongle’s password on  _ its _ keypad.”

Troy sighed. “And of course you don’t know the passcode for the dongle.”

“Of course I do, I’m the one who had to set it up for him. Password’s 01R7HGT34B8.” Murray rattled off the alphanumeric with a rapid cadence. “Unless Chang’s changed it, and he wouldn’t know how to if it even occurred to him to try.”

“H, G… could you repeat that?” Jordan asked.

“01R7HGT34B8.”

“...B, 8,” Jordan muttered, writing it down. "Is it case-sensitive?"

“Good boy.” Shirley beamed at her son.

“It's not case-sensitive. I think it's not. But of course that information is useless without the dongle,” Murray said.

“Can you stop saying ‘dongle?’ It just sounds dirty,” grumped Pierce.

“If by some miracle you get through the door to the basement, you’d have to deal with the guard down there, and the actual mechanical room door, which is locked with another key, which, oh yeah, it’s around Chang’s neck at all times.”

“Diabolical,” murmured Troy. “Two doors with two different locks. Who could possibly have imagined?”

“Well, it’s a pretty picture,” said Murray, leaning back and looking smug. “No way in, unless—“

“Sorry! Sorry I’m late!” Britta rushed into the dining room. “I had to pick up my—what are you guys all doing here?”

“I had to get out of the house because Andre’s sister is using our living room for a multilevel marketing presentation.” Shirley made a sour face. “Sweetsie Darling. Another racket trying to rip off Lady Miss Lady… They’re vultures, I tried to warn her, but she thinks she can make it work.”

“Checking the campus perimeter only took a few minutes,” Abed said, “so I came here after.”

“And I was bored,” explained Pierce.

“In the act of meeting Murray here, Troy has created no fewer than fifty-two different timelines,” Abed declared. “And that’s just depending on how many of the rest of tagged along. I thought we were in the Abed-Shirley-Pierce timeline but it turns out we’re in the Abed-Shirley-Pierce-Britta timeline. Except we’re in Abed-Shirley-Pierce-Britta-Prime, because Britta came in late. So..” Abed blinked, noticing that everyone was staring at him. “Never mind."

"It's cool, buddy," Troy assured him. "We're all just very interested in what you're saying."

"Yeah!" Britta nodded fervently, only partially because Troy had kicked her.

Abed shrugged. "Pretend I was saying something normal. Burritos are good. Yay nachos.”

“Yay nachos!” Jordan cried, clearly agreeing wholeheartedly. 

“Right. Britta, Murray. Murray, Britta,” Troy said as, nonplussed, Britta pulled a chair up next to him.

“Now, I‘ll happily sit here all night, it’s all the same to me,” Murray said, “but are we done?”

“Oh,” Britta whined. “Did I miss it?”

“It’s okay,” Troy assured her, then turned back to Murray. “Maybe we could go over it again, so Britta can hear and we can be sure we didn’t forget anything?”

“And how’s everybody doing tonight? I have some kids’ menus!” their server exclaimed as he approached the group from behind Britta. “Is this the entire party?”

“Unless Annie or Jeff are going to suddenly appear,” said Shirley.

“This will be on separate checks,” Pierce warned the server.

“Not likely,” Britta said.

Pierce scoffed. “Well, sure, you guys are family, but I’m not picking up the bill for this guy!” He pointed at Murray.

“No, no, I mean, Jeff and Annie won’t be here. They’re busy. They’re secretly dating. Crap! No. I promised I wouldn’t say anything!” Britta groaned.

“Jeff and Annie are secretly dating?” Abed sounded skeptical. “That doesn’t hang together.”

“I know, I know, he’s gay, we all know,” Pierce said to Abed. “But he’s in denial about it. You remember, he was boinking this one—“ He jerked a thumb towards Britta.

Jordan made a note.

“You don’t have to—“ Shirley started to remonstrate him.

“I know what boinking means, Mom,” Jordan said. “I just thought it was funny.”

“So secret dating is his MO,” Pierce concluded. “His love language, if you will.”

“Not what that means,” muttered Jordan.

Britta threw her hands up, flustered. “Okay, first off, Jeff and I were never secretly dating, we were just… I’m not on trial here!”

Troy took a deep breath. “It’s okay,” he assured her.

“And, you know, they said they  _ weren’t _ secretly dating and that I was wrong…”

“Yeah,  _ that _ tracks,” said Abed. “Jeff is a private person but Annie would want to confide in one of us. And Britta is wrong about things a lot.”

“Dude,” Troy snapped, “she’s sitting right here!”

“Should I come back?” asked the server. “I’ll come back,” he decided.

“I can do a quick recap,” Abed suggested. “All the stuff we knew already, plus the dean is in the basement of the cafeteria behind two locked doors. The key to the first locked door is in Chang’s office, and the key to the other is around Chang’s neck.”

“And Troy is the messiah,” said Elijah. “Messiah messiah!”

Shirley shushed him.

“Kids,” Murray said with a nervous chuckle. “They always repeat the most esoteric tidbit of hidden occult wisdom, am I right?”

“In what sense is Troy a messiah?” Britta asked, interested.

“He—look, do you even know what the word means?” Shirley asked, clearly put out by what she perceived as trivialization of her deeply-held beliefs.

Shirley’s question was directed at Britta but Murray answered. “You know. The truest repairman." He seemed surprised when no one nodded. "The repairer of men? Come to redeem the ancient brotherhood of air-conditioning repair and onsite infrastructure maintenance technicians?"

"Were we supposed to already know this?" Pierce asked.

"You guys all went to Greendale, right? Why do you think the school exists?" Murray looked at each of them in turn, aghast at their incomprehension. "It's not just to provide cover for the wizard's lair!"

"There's a wizard, now?" Shirley asked dubiously.

"We don’t talk about the wizard… Troy is the truest repairman!" Murray tried again, "The man who fixed the unfixable water fountain?“

“Oh, right," Troy said insincerely. "Sure. I remember now. Or I'm hearing it for the first time, whichever." He shrugged. “Let’s just move on.”

“But I wasn’t supposed to tell you!” Murray looked haunted for a second. “Listen, just keep it on the down-low, okay? I don’t want to get thrown in the caverns of eternal ice or fed to the trolls or turned over to the wizard to be his slave—“

“This is getting very weird very fast,” Britta said. “Is this why you guys tried to recruit Troy back in the fall?”

“That was before we—why am I answering your questions? That was rhetorical. We’re done here.”

“Wait!” Britta grabbed at Murray’s arm as he started to get up. “First, you’re skipping out on the check and leaving Pierce to pay for it—“

“Hey, yeah!” cried Pierce.

“And second, if Troy is your messiah don’t you  _ have _ to help us?”

"Ugh." Murray collapsed back into his seat. " _ If _ he were the truest repairman, which, you know, it hasn't been confirmed, he hasn't claimed the frozen throne in the Halls of Zul'Drak…"

Britta was leaning forward. "That's a metaphorical throne, right?"

" _ If _ your boyfriend here was the truest repairman then yes, I would be obliged to follow his commands, me and the rest of the boys in the annex."

"Oh, I'm not her boyfriend," Troy said. He looked down at his hands, suddenly bashful. 

"Yeah, yes, I was, yeah," Britta agreed, playing with her hair and examining her shoes.

Shirley groaned theatrically. "It never stops with these people!"

"What never stops, Mom?" Jordan asked her, pen poised to record her answer.

The server reappeared before Shirley could respond. "And have we had a chance to look at menus?" he asked brightly. When he saw the group's response, or lack thereof, he sighed. I'll give you another minute. In the meantime, I have chips and salsa!"

"My point is," Murray declared as he lunged for the salsa verde, "you aren't the truest repairman yet, you're just a candidate. Haven't done the trials. Maybe Jerry would come when you snap your fingers, or Telly, but I'm one of the Vice-dean's men. And Laybourne says you're persona non grata until you accept his terms."

Troy nodded grimly. "Move into the annex housing, sequester myself in the annex, cut all ties with the outside world, and switch to a no-carb diet. I remember."

"No carbs at all?" Pierce sounded scandalized.

"None," Troy said in a hushed tone.

"Well, obviously we're not doing that," Britta announced. "We're not losing Troy. He’s very important to...to all of us!" Shirley rolled her eyes as Troy reached over and gave Britta’s hand a quick, reassuring squeeze.

"Then we're done here," Murray said through a mouthful of chips and salsa.

"Wait," Shirley said. "Wait!" 

"You guys aren't the boss of me," Murray said, rising. "And you're  _ definitely _ not the boss of me," he told Shirley in particular.

She ignored his insolent tone. "Who are Jerry and Telly? Do you have their contact information?"

"Also," Pierce interjected, "I never know what to order. What's good here? Chimichangas, yes or no?"


	3. The Next Day

After dinner with the weasley air-conditioning repairman finally ended (Britta had the vegetarian burrito plate) there was a flurry of planning. Annie and Jeff were at the apartment when the group arrived, being very casual in a way that only strengthened Britta’s suspicion that there was secret dating happening. But they dodged her questions and joined everybody else around the dinner table. There were maps and floor plans to pore over, costumes to sketch out, a little arithmetic.

Benny slept through the whole thing and Jordan and Elijah watched TV, joined first by Pierce and then by Abed. Eventually Shirley declared it was time to go home, which triggered departures from Pierce and Jeff. Britta would have gone, too—Pierce offered her a ride—but Troy suggested she stick around for one episode of _Inspector Spacetime_ and the next thing she knew she was waking up on the sofa the next morning and Annie was making pancakes.

Troy had gotten a couple of telephone numbers from Murray the night before but couldn’t use them until that morning. Either it was because the annex’s voicemail system was monitored, or maybe it was about union rules regarding taking calls outside business hours. Britta wasn’t sure and didn’t ask. She wasn’t sure what to expect from this “Jerry,” but he turned out to be a smallish black guy her dad’s age, with a mustache. His soft-spoken friend “Telly” was twice Jerry’s size, a white guy whose age Britta guessed as “medium” and whose body she would describe as "lumpy." They had drab coveralls and a big box of donuts and a smaller box of coffee, and apologized for not bringing gift baskets, something Troy graciously forgave them for.

And then Jeff and Pierce and Shirley and Andre and Jordan and Elijah and little Benny were all there. While the kids watched more cartoons and Andre made small talk with Jerry and Telly, the rest of them were all rehearsing patter, going over the timetable, getting into costumes. They didn’t have time to run a full dress rehearsal, this heist was going straight to previews.

Britta was in Annie’s room, at her little vanity, trying for the third time to disguise herself with gothy mascara and pale foundation. Her look kept coming out less ‘sexy gothy distracting mysterious unrecognizable magician’s assistant’ and more ‘Britta in clown-face.’ She’d get it, though. Back when she lived in New York she’d gone through a children-of-the-night phase same as everybody else. She was just rusty.

She turned at a sudden knock at the door. “Yeah?” she called, half-suspecting Jordan (or Pierce) was going to pretend to mistake it for the bathroom or something and burst in hoping to see her naked.

It was Annie instead. “Can I come in?” she called back through the door.

“Sure, it’s your room.” Britta turned back to the vanity mirror as Annie slipped in, closing the door behind her and securing it with the hook-and-eye latch.

“I was wondering why you had that,” Britta commented to her.

Annie sighed. “When I first moved in there was...I needed to establish boundaries with the guys. No filming me while I sleep, that kind of thing.”

Britta turned and gave her an eyebrow. “They were filming you while you—“

“It was okay! I mean, kind of.”

“That’s right, when we were at that dumb psychiatrist you said Abed snuck into your room in the middle of the night.” Britta shuddered, remembering. At the time it had barely registered.

“It was the kind of thing I’d be up for, you know, if we’d talked about it first. He just didn’t think to ask permission and I figured, better to be clear.”

Britta nodded slowly. “...Yeah. Definitely better to be clear. Abed…”

“He just doesn’t always consider other people’s perspectives.” Annie bit her lip. “It’s not… I had the latch left over from when I fixed up my old apartment. I feel like I’m making it sound worse than it was.”

“It sounds pretty bad.”

“I don’t want to have to move again, Britta.” Annie sighed. “So it couldn’t have been that bad.”

“Okay.” Britta tried to reassure Annie, who looked miserable. “You know. And if there’s anything I can help you with. I meant what I said, that time with…" She struggled to find the right words. "With the banana.”

It must have been the right thing to say, because Annie smiled shyly and approached her for a quick hug. “Thanks. How’s the costume coming?” she asked as she sat down on the edge of the bed. “I was thinking, you don’t know where everything is.”

“It’s coming,” Britta said decisively. She examined herself in the mirror. “I just…keep looking more clowny than I want. Like thirty percent too much clown.”

“Maybe more eyeshadow?”

“Maybe…” Suddenly Britta remembered there was something she wanted to talk to Annie about. She turned away from her reflection, towards her friend. “Oh, hey! So what’s with you and Jeff last night?”

“What?” Was that a flicker of anxiety Britta saw pass across Annie’s face? “We told you at the time. Yesterday was his birthday but we didn’t—he didn’t want to make a big thing of it, and back on my birthday I promised to buy him a drink on his. And the Smiling Pineapple was the first place I could find with banana daiquiris.”

“So you’re saying you’re not secretly dating.” Britta leaned forward and patted Annie’s knee. “You could tell me. We’re banana sisters!”

Annie made a face.

“Okay, no, I knew as soon as I said it, that sounds gross. You know what I’m talking about. You helped me with Blade. I’m not going to say we’re Blade sisters.” She worried that she was talking nonsense. “That makes it sound like we share a hot lover who hunts vampires while being half-vampire himself. And maybe we’re half-vampires too, so we can hunt the vampires better. I didn’t see the movies.”

“I would have said a knife-fighting girl gang,” Annie said, but she was smiling.

“I know I’ve said this before, but before you and Shirley I didn’t really have a lot of female friendships. There was always some guy we were in competition over, and, I didn’t want to be like other girls, you know, it was stupid.” Britta shook her head. “I just mean, I’m glad we’re friends without any of that bullshit getting in the way, you know? Not fighting for Troy’s attention.”

Annie’s eyes had widened very slightly, and her eyebrows shifted upwards almost imperceptibly. “Yeah, we’re definitely not in competition over Troy.”

“Or Vaughn,” Britta added, conceding the point. “God, remember him?”

“So dumb,” muttered Annie.

“So dumb. I’m glad we can talk about this. I know you used to have a crush on Troy—“

“In high school!” Annie gave a slightly exaggerated scoff. “Ages ago. I didn’t really know him.”

A sudden thought struck Britta. “And of course, if you _did_ have a crush on Troy now, that would be fine. Fine with me. It’s not like Troy and I are together. He’s just, um, an example. Like, better Troy than Pierce, right?”

Annie glanced around, like she thought she might be on a hidden camera. “Or Jeff?” she finally asked.

“Jeff?” Britta blinked. “Oh, Jeff! Sure. You had a crush on Jeff, too, for a while. I remember.”

“Yeah. I mean, I’m over it. I’m over him. He’s just a guy. But you and he were…” Annie made an extremely vague and euphemistic hand gesture.

“Yeah… I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable by leaping to the conclusion that you guys were secretly dating, last night.”

“It was a fair guess,” Annie allowed. This line of conversation seemed to be making her a little uncomfortable.

“I know, you guys are friends, is all. Like, we’re all friends, but…anyway, Abed pointed out that…”

“Wait, you talked to _Abed_ about it?” Annie looked stricken.

“Yeah, no! It was okay!” Britta tried to mollify her friend. “Nobody thought you were, like, doing anything wrong!”

“‘Nobody?’” Annie repeated. “Who did you—never mind. You know what? Never mind.”

Britta considered explaining the situation the night before at Señor Kevin’s but decided against it. There was an extended pause in their conversation. Britta had just started to turn back to the vanity mirror, when Annie spoke up.

“You and Jeff _were_ secretly dating, for a while.”

“What? No.” Britta fumbled with the mascara.

“Like a year, year and a half ago?” Annie persisted.

“Oh, that.” Britta scowled, unsure whether she was more irritated by the still-too-clownlike face in the mirror or the memories Annie was dredging up. “I’m going for mime, but like, sexy mime? Anyway. That wasn’t secret dating.”

“Yeah," she heard Annie say behind her, "that’s what Jeff said.”

“It was just…it was barely anything.” Britta tried to focus on her makeup as she spoke. “We were hanging out one night, I forget why, and there was…we ran out of stuff to talk about, and we started kissing, and that led to sex. Afterwards we were like, well, that’s a one-off, doesn’t mean anything, not really interested in doing it again, we were just bored and drunk...” Britta had never actually talked to anybody about this before, and once she’d started she found it hard to stop. “So the next weekend, we were hanging out again, and it happened again. Ran out of stuff to talk about, started touching. And neither of us were seeing anybody or anything so we… For a while every time was going to be the last time, but every time we had less to talk about, it felt like, like, when you go to your dealer and you have to hang out with him for a while before you can buy, and he’s talking about his shitty band or whatever and you’re like, god, shut up! We’re not really friends!”

In the vanity mirror the reflection of Annie nodded, like this made sense to her.

“So before too long, that was just all we did. We didn’t hang out, we didn’t have fun together, we just met up and had sex. It stopped being fun pretty quick. I don’t know why I kept doing it.” 

Britta stared at herself in the mirror for a moment. On the bed, Annie stirred, but said nothing.

“I don’t know why he kept doing it, either. Like I said, neither of us were seeing anybody. And then you guys all found out about it, and it seemed gross, looking at it from outside. Like making out with your cousin. We were just looking for an excuse to quit, I guess.”

“So you really weren't secretly dating,” Annie said quietly.

“I mean, when I walked up to you last night, you two were looking at each other and talking and smiling, and that’s all stuff I never did with him. Before, maybe, sometimes, but…” Britta’s voice caught. She found herself blinking back tears, and had to wipe away her makeup. Didn’t matter, it was bad makeup. “For the last, jeez, the last year, Jeff and I have barely spoken to each other unless it’s with all you guys. It’s like we stopped being friends and became friends-in-law. Or, no, it’s not like that, but…” She trailed off, trying not to cry.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” Annie was all up in her personal space, rubbing her shoulder, wiping her face. “I didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”

“God, look at us! Such a cliche, sitting around talking about boys while I do my makeup. We should be drinking rose.”

“Rosé,” Annie corrected absently. “And it’s not even noon.”

“But, you know, I don’t want him to suffer alone forever, I guess, just because he… That’s what I like about Troy. He’s thoughtful and considerate and he’s just all...potential. Like there’s this awesome version of himself that he’s still figuring out how to be.” Britta frowned. “That sounds dumb.”

“No, not at all,” Annie said.

“Anyway I don’t know why I keep using Troy as an example. I’m _definitely_ not secretly sleeping with Troy.”

“You like Troy, though.”

“I—“ Britta hadn’t expected Annie to come right out with that, even if she did suspect. “Yeah. Well, yeah. But I don’t think I’m his type.”

Annie nodded, half-suppressing a wry smile. “You’re too sophisticated?”

“He’s just so nice. He‘ll date some nice girl.”

“You’re nice.”

“He’ll meet some nice girl,” said Britta again. “Maybe share her with Abed, I don’t know. I lived in New York. People got crazy with their relationships sometimes... Maybe he’ll just date Abed.”

Annie hummed. “Having lived with them both for a while: nope on that one. Pretty sure.”

Britta squeezed Annie’s hand where it was draped over her shoulder. “Okay, Okay. We gotta do this. I gotta get into this makeup, and then go with Jeff and…” She sighed. “And you need to get into your worksuit, put your hair up, get ready to go with Troy and Abed.”

Britta watched the reflection of Annie in the mirror nod slowly, like she was mulling something over. “You want to switch?” Annie said suddenly.

“What?” Britta straightened up.

“You wear the coveralls, I wear the… whatever you call it…” She indicated the goth-doll magician’s assistant outfit spread out on the bed.

“That’s a great idea!” Britta grinned. “That way I get to hang out with Troy and Abed and you’re stuck with Jeff, but you like Jeff, so it’s okay!”

Annie cleared her throat, suddenly looking anxious.

“I mean, I know, you’re totally over him, you don’t _like-_ like Jeff. Because he’s such a douche. Again, sorry I assumed you were secretly dating. But you’re friends! You can _stand_ Jeff…”

Annie nodded. “For brief periods and special occasions, yes.”

Britta thrust a fist into the air, almost accidentally punching Annie in the jaw. “Banana sisters!”


	4. Just After That

There was an unspoken assumption among his friends that left to his own devices Jeff would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and preen indefinitely, so they put him in the dreamatorium instead. Troy dragged in a freestanding floor mirror they'd gotten somewhere, which worked if Jeff tilted it up a bit. It was only five feet tall, after all.

His first idea had been to disguise himself as somebody cosplaying the Crow, but that immediately proved beyond his extremely limited makeup skills. Instead he just layered on eyeshadow and hoped for the best. Under the hair-metal wig, with the leather vest, he'd look less like a raccoon. Probably.

Jeff was staring at himself in the mirror and trying to decide whether some kind of body paint tribal tattoo on his chest would help sell the look, when he heard a knock at the dreamatorium door.

"It's Britta!" he heard her call through the door. "Are you decent?"

"Sure, come in," he said without looking away from his own reflection. "You can tell me if I need a tattoo."

He did a double take, though, when Britta came in. Reflected in the mirror she looked amazing — a goth doll with porcelain skin and exactly the kind of face makeup he'd decided against trying himself. She was also totally unrecognizable as herself. Jeff wouldn't have guessed if he hadn't known that it was Britta. It had been a couple of years since he last looked at Britta and thought _hot_ , but now...

"Wow, good job," he said after a second. He turned around slowly, trying to recover. "Don't read too much into it, but you look good."

She struck a pose and grinned, pleased. When Britta smiled her face lit up in a way he'd never seen it do before… and in a fraction of a second he realized why. Even under the makeup and in disguise, he knew that smile.

He cleared his throat, suddenly aware that he was just standing there looking at her, at Annie. And she was just standing there being looked at. "So, Britta," he began, not letting on that he'd identified her. "What did you need?"

Annie-as-Britta shrugged and mimed feeling an invisible wall, the universal gesture for the idea of pantomime.

"You want to practice being silent?" He tried not to smile. The playfulness in Annie's affect would have clued him in on her not being Britta, if he hadn't already realized. Normally anyone trying this kind of game would just elicit eyerolls and sarcasm, but there was something about the sight of Annie in that costume…

She bowed slightly, bending towards him at the waist, as she touched her nose and grinned again while pointing at him with her other hand. 

"You look really great, Britta," he said again. "Now tell me, how do I look?"

Annie-as-Britta straightened up and put one finger on her black-painted lips. Her eyes were big and round and blue, bluer than he'd ever seen them. They widened slightly as she examined him hungrily.

His breath caught, but he recovered quickly. Annie didn't notice his reaction, she was too busy pretending to leer at his bare chest and arms. He swallowed, and raised his arms up, clasping his hands together behind his head.

Annie-as-Britta's gaze slid up from his body to his face and then they were making eye contact. She smiled again, and he found himself nodding slightly. He met with her approval, apparently.

Then she spun around, and when she faced him again her expression was blankly serene. Then she looked inquisitive, and he gathered she was asking him if she was sufficiently mysterious and distracting.

"Yes, yes, you look delicious, mysterious, and extremely distracting." Jeff cleared his throat and took a step towards her. "I'm very distracted right now."

She shimmied closer to him in a way that he recognized from her Mrs. Claus dance. Once she was close enough she reached out and rested a hand on his chest, looking up at him with round eyes and a flirtatious moue. As if daring him to make a move.

"So," he said slowly, extremely aware of his own breathing. "How quickly do you think you can get in and out of that corset?"

Annie rocked back from him slightly, and bit her lip. Then she let out a tiny squeak as he suddenly wrapped one arm around her waist.

"I don't know what it is, Britta," he said breathlessly. He wasn't sure what he was even doing — teasing her? No, because that implied insincerity. Whatever. What it was wasn't important, not just then. "Normally I'm not even slightly attracted to you, you know that, and vice-versa, right? But right now—"

He broke off as Annie grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him down to her and kissed him. His other arm went around her at shoulder level and he pulled her tight to him, almost reflexively. Then he raised his head up, separating from her, trying to get above water so he could breathe.

"Jesus, Annie!" And then he went down again, and a third time…

Only a few seconds later he became aware of a rattling at the dreamatorium door. Annie disentangled from him and took a few unsteady steps backwards, towards the door. She looked dizzy. He couldn't tell if that was more pantomime performance, or the aftereffects of that kiss. He felt dizzy himself.

"Annie!" he whispered urgently. “What are we—“

Smiling, she shushed him. Then, without taking her eyes off Jeff, she fumbled behind her for the door and unlocked it.

As soon as she had, the door was opening and Britta was sticking her head through. "Did it work? Did we fool you?"

She was wearing a drab jumpsuit that more or less matched what the annex repairmen wore, the one Annie was supposed to use. It didn't fit her especially well.

"Did we fool you?" she asked again as she came into the room.

Jeff was nonplussed for a moment. "I figured it out." He quickly turned back to the mirror and started wiping Annie's makeup off his face. Britta didn't notice.

In the mirror he could see Annie smile at Britta conspiratorially. "We definitely fooled him. At least for a minute there. He did figure it out eventually." 

"Pretty quickly! Before!" The words came out before he'd thought. Definitely before he'd remembered Britta was right there.

"Before what?" Britta looked at Annie, then at him, then back to Annie.

She shrugged lightly. He wondered if she could sense his eyes boring into her — she certainly wasn’t making eye contact with him in the mirror, or giving him any hint as to what the hell she’d been thinking when they kissed. When she kissed him. She’d started it.

But Britta was smiling and nodding, like she didn’t suspect anything. "Cool! Oh, your makeup got smeared," she told her.

Annie looked surprised. "It did?" She stepped over into Jeff's personal space to examine herself in the mirror. "Huh! How did that happen?" she asked innocently. He felt sparks as she brushed lightly against him, still not looking him in the eye. Then she grabbed his arm for support as she leaned in, and he felt her squeeze his bicep while her other hand wiped at her smeared lip gloss.

Britta frowned. "I don't know, I wasn't here, did you rub your face on something?"

Annie shrugged. "Well, let's get it fixed." She turned to Jeff, finally, and flashed a grin he recognized as smug. "Talk to you later!"

"...Yeah," Jeff said, and then they were gone.

He wondered if it was too early for a drink. Probably. He still had a magic act to fake his way through, after all.


	5. Parking Lot C; Annie's Head

“Walk me through it again,” Troy said as he tried not to pace. He wished he smoked, so he would have a lighter and a pack of cigarettes to play with. Or more candy cigarettes, since he’d torn through his one pack in a hurry. As it was, he was just left with his phone, which still didn’t have any new texts.

“When Chang or one of the kids or whoever, when _somebody_ calls maintenance about the clogged toilet that your friend Ms. Bennett is going to clog...” Jerry trailed off. “That’s not what you’re asking about.”

Troy scoffed, because Jerry was so slow to grasp the obvious. “No, dummy, I know all that. Tell me about why you two showed up, is what I’m asking. Please.”

“Okay. I mean, where should I start? I’ll start at the beginning.” Jerry nodded tightly, agreeing with himself. “Since the founding of the modern air-conditioner repair school in 1978, after the reformation of the old Greendale Vocational & Technical Institute, we’ve been guided by a set of prophecies passed down from ancient days.”

“The Seventies, yeah, yeah.” If Troy had planned better he could have had a cold cup of coffee to be sipping anxiously while they waited. “Go on.”

“Foremost among these scrolls was the Book of Montgomery, penned by…well, that doesn’t matter.”

“Montgomery?” Troy guessed.

“So _some_ scholars suspect.” Jerry shrugged. “Others aren’t so sure. The Book tells of the coming of a messianic figure, the so-called Truest Repairman, who will repair not just the implements of climate control, but the men who wield them.”

“Now there’s weather control?” Troy’s eyes widened. “Like, satellites?” He glanced upward.

“Yes, but—“ Jerry chuckled “—not satellites as you would understand them.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Troy declared.

“Engines of glass and clay! Mirrors and lenses! Whizzing through the upper atmosphere!” cried Telly. He threw his arms up dramatically. “Zoom!” Seeing Troy’s expression, he lowered his arms and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his gray coveralls. “Sorry. Sorry. Got carried away for a second there. Sorry.”

“It’s okay, Telly,” Troy assured him.

“Oh!” Telly seemed touched. “You remembered my name. The Truest Repairman remembered my name!”

“This is getting off-track,” Jerry said, a little testily (maybe he wasn’t sure Troy remembered _his_ name). “The coming of the Truest Repairman will be marked by three signs, two of which have already come to pass. The first—“

“Hold that thought, _Jerry_ ,” Troy said as he spotted his friends coming around the corner of the old computer science building. He waved, in case they hadn’t noticed him.

“They moved the checkpoint out to the entrance to the athletic field,” Abed said as he and Britta strode up. “We had to take the long way around.”

“Britta, hi.” Troy eyed her and tried to think of something to say besides _why are you here instead of Annie?_ “You’re blonde.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Britta smiled shyly. She seemed to understand his implied question. “Annie and I switched roles.”

“Right, because she and Jeff are secretly dating.” Troy nodded.

“They’re not,” Abed interjected. “We would know if they were. We went over this.”

“We do know,” countered Troy, “that’s why we’re talking about it. Right?” He glanced back at Britta.

She was playing with her hair, which was mostly tucked up under a gray knitted cap. “I don’t think so? I mean, I think Abed's right.”

“Sorry, who are we talking about?” Telly asked. “The lady with the kids and the old white fella? She’s married to the other guy, I thought.”

“No, no, no…” Jerry was shaking his head. “The other guy is Jeff, that’s who we’re talking about. Jeff.”

“Why would Jeff’s wife be secretly dating her own husband?” Telly scratched his head. “Keeping it fresh?”

“You have three kids, you’re not going to have a lot of time to yourself,” theorized Jerry. “Maybe they sneak away.”

“Guys!” Troy raised his voice slightly, but only slightly. “I’m Troy, this is Britta and Abed. Our friends are Jeff the younger white guy, Pierce the older white guy, Annie the hot nerd, and Shirley. And Shirley’s husband Andre, you met him too.”

“You think Annie’s hot?” Britta asked in a tone of exaggerated casualness. “I mean, I definitely wouldn’t feel threatened by that. Women aren’t here to compete for male attention. Annie and I are like sisters. I don't know why I'm even asking. It's _so_ not a thing.”

Troy and Abed exchanged glances. “Hotness is really subjective,” Troy said carefully.

“You’re all very hot, I think,” Telly offered. “Handsome, handsome, gorgeous...“ He pointed to each of them in turn. “And your other friends? Forehead guy, wow! And his girlfriend. You could all be on television. _Network_ television!”

“I wouldn’t say I’m _gorgeous_.” Troy grinned bashfully as Britta frowned and Abed nodded and shrugged. “You’re making me self-conscious, Telly.”

“Oh! Telegenic, humble, _and_ he remembers my name. I love this man!” Telly started to raise his arms for a hug, but remembered himself before completing the gesture. “I’d follow you into hell, boss.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that.” Troy mulled it over. “Not today, at least.”

“Why would you follow Troy, of all people, into hell?” Britta asked Telly. “No offense, Troy.”

“I said! He’s telegenic, humble, he remembers my name, he’s the Truest Repairman…”

“Yeah, yeah, but even so—“

Jerry cleared his throat. "According to the Book of Montgomery, the Truest Repairman's coming would be marked by three signs, two of which have already come to pass. First, Obama was elected."

"That was huge!" Telly looked self-conscious. "I mean, it was."

"Second," Jerry continued, "an albino troll was born to the royal family of the Zul'Drak tribe."

"Also huge." Telly nodded solemnly. "Those trolls are big, hoo boy."

"Did you say 'Zul'Drak’?" Abed asked. "He said 'Zul'Drak,' that's from _World of Warcraft_."

Jerry nodded. "There's a long history of cooperation between the trolls and the air-conditioning repair school. Ever since the peace accords in the early nineteen-nineties."

"Truly a blessed day," Telly added. "We had a parade and everything."

"Hidden signs are planted in media to prepare the public for the eventual revelations," Jerry explained.

"Sure, sure." Britta sounded like she’d heard all this before. "The airport. That's, like, New World Order 101."

Troy blinked in confusion. "There's a class we could be taking on this stuff?" 

"As the Truest Repairman, you'll be able to grasp it easily, even intuitively," Telly assured him. "That's the sixth trial, actually, is you have to navigate the labyrinth under the Denver International Airport blindfolded before the sun rises."

Jerry hissed at Telly. "Dude! Shut up!"

"Right, right, that's a secret." Telly nodded, shamefaced. "Act surprised, boss, would you please?"

There was a burst of static that drowned everything else out. It took Troy a moment to realize that it was coming from the walkie-talkie on Jerry’s belt.

Somebody on the other end of the walkie-talkie said something that sounded to Troy like the trombone noises when Charlie Brown’s teacher speaks.

Jerry had the walkie-talkie up to his mouth before the whoever-it-was finished saying whatever-they-said. “This is Red Five, I’m on it. Rogue Leader, you can stand down.”

"And that's us." Telly glanced at Troy, Britta, and Abed. "Are we ready? Did we need to talk about chemtrails or who's prettier than who some more?"

"Pretty suggests femininity," Abed pointed out. "Troy and Jeff are in the mix."

"And you, too," said Britta.

Abed shrugged. "I do all right."

"What was that about chemtrails?" Britta asked.

"We don't have time for this!" Troy clapped his hands together. "We're all pretty, Britta's super hot, ice trolls may or may not be real, _break!_ "

"Break!" yelled Telly, pumping his fists in the air. "Sorry, sorry, I just, I get excited."

The thing about Annie Edison was that on the inside she was still the high-school girl in the back brace with the bad skin and the greasy hair who didn’t try to, for want of a better phrase, look pretty, because she’d believed it was impossible for her to ever feel good about herself, looks-wise.

The self-care routine she’d learned in rehab had spun into making herself as presentable as possible at all times, a task she threw herself into with the same wild, tireless abandon that she did her school work, her volunteering that had mostly fallen by the wayside, her rigorous money management. But there was a difference between looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking that what you saw would have to do, and actually feeling pretty.

Vaughn had made her feel pretty, until the novelty wore off. And Jeff sometimes made her feel pretty. When she’d needed him in the middle of the night and texted him, hoping that it would get him there quicker if she phrased the request ambiguously, she’d been gratified when he’d shown up in a clean shirt with carefully mussed hair and barely-concealed disappointment that she hadn’t texted him for a tryst after all.

Because she’d told herself, over and over again, that she was over Jeff, that she didn’t have a crush on him, that they were just good friends…but it was still nice to see him looking at her like she was nice to look at. Occasionally he even complimented her on her shoes or her hair or something. It wasn’t like it meant anything.

But when she saw herself in the mirror, dolled up in the goth disguise, and Britta commented that nobody would recognize her, showing Jeff was the first thing that popped into her head. Because she looked good. With Britta’s assistance, when she’d looked in the mirror, she’d seen someone who didn’t look even a little bit like a girl who’d worn a back brace or orthodontic headgear.

And his reaction had been gratifying. She’d watched him lose his train of thought, so captivated by the sight of her. Even if he thought she was Britta.

Which he denied afterwards, and even if he had thought she was Britta for a moment, he’d realized it was her before he put his arms around her, she knew. Before they’d kissed.

In the moment she’d rationalized it by telling herself that she just wanted to prove she could provoke a reaction in him, that she could make him want to kiss her, if not to love her. But now, as she watched him growl his way through a magic show, resplendent in his own goth regalia, she had to admit: she was very attracted to him, nevertheless. And kissing was fun.

They hadn’t talked about the kiss since it happened. There hadn’t really been time when they were alone together, until they were striding into Chang’s throne room, and then of course they had to be in character. If anybody had noticed Ricky Nightshade and his assistant giving one another smoldering looks, well, presumably Ricky Nightshade and Raven Midnight (she had secretly decided on a name for her character even though she knew it wasn’t going to come up) were lovers. Why wouldn’t they be?

And how did Jeff know how to do close-up magic? He’d pulled a carpet bag of props out of the trunk of his car and dodged her question about where he’d gotten it and when.

If Jeff and Britta had talked about how the act was going to go, and Annie presumed they hadn’t, then she certainly hadn’t been clued in. So she had to pay close attention, make sure she was ready to hand him a scarf or snatch a rose from his hands or whatever. It meant a lot of staring at Jeff as he performed for an audience in his shirtless vested glory, oh no, how would she cope? It was fun. By the time they were at the main event, she’d almost forgotten they weren’t just playing together.

But then Chang was on his feet and blindfolded, and Jeff was holding up a big silk tube and Annie was slipping a big wall clock on a chain around Chang’s neck and lifting the key at the same time (this was the trickiest bit but the blindfold did most of the work), and then she was quietly scooting to the back of the throne room and dropping the key down the grate to where Jordan was waiting for it, and then the hard part was over and all they had to do was stall.

Then, of course, Pierce showed up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so, I've been skipping the part where I thank Amrywiol and Bethanyactually for giving me notes, and you the reader for reading. Also this is the part where I suggest that comments really, really make my day. And as regards this chapter, no, you're not imagining things, if you noticed: I changed the title of the fic at this point. Actually as I type this I haven't yet, but I intend to in the next couple minutes.


	6. Throne Room

Jeff was in the middle of a long card trick when the gong sounded. The trick itself wasn’t long, it was very simple: you had the mark pick a card, you put the card on the top of the deck and then the card stayed on the top of the deck while you distracted the mark by shuffling the rest of the deck and maybe asking the mark to cut the deck, after which you put the deck back the way it was. It was the first card trick anybody who learned card tricks learned. Maybe half of all card tricks were a version of it.

Annie had been just enough of a social outcast in high school to start to learn card tricks. The phase hadn’t lasted long but she’d mastered enough of this most basic trick well enough to recognize it was what Jeff was doing, so she did her part by turning up the volume on the boom box and dancing like an idiot with a weirdo grin plastered on her face. That was the assistant's job, after all. It was why her outfit was so…shiny.

The whole thing was surprisingly fun if she ignored Chang and the handful of cronies lurking around the throne room. Teenage boys who were too scared to leer at her, mostly. Instead she just focused on Jeff, grinning at him while he tried to growl patter about the spirits of angsty vengeance who were empowering him to guess Chang's card. She especially liked the bit where Jeff pretended to get distracted by her dancing and lose track of the trick.

But then there was a gong and somebody turned off _the Eagles Greatest Hits Volume II_ (they'd been limited to the CDs Shirley had in her car). 

"What’s the dilly-yo?" Chang demanded from his throne. "The magicians were just getting to their big finish!"

"Ricky Nightshade doesn’t appreciate this unprofessional treatment," Jeff growled as Annie crossed the room to stand close by him. In case that was needed.

Elijah and a squad of middle schoolers led Pierce into the throne room. For some reason he was wearing a ridiculous and culturally-insensitive turban twice the size of his head. Annie scowled. They’d discussed the turban and he’d been told no. At least he'd abandoned the brownface. "Got another magician here. I mean, he says he’s here for the magic show," Elijah called.

"That’s right!" Pierce cried out. "I’m Carnac the Magnificent!" He grinned like he was making a reference to something nobody had ever heard of. "Master of the psychic magic of ancient Persia! I have envelopes and everything!"

"What?" Chang squinted at the interloper. "Pierce? Pierce Hawthorne? Leader of the so-called Greendale Seven?"

Jeff and Annie exchanged glances.

"What? No! I’m Carnac!" announced Pierce. "I’m not that devilishly handsome master criminal, I’m a stage magician like Richie Nightingale over here. My assistant, he is, actually." Pierce pointed at Jeff, just in case there was any confusion.

Chang followed Pierce’s sight-line, and did a double take. "Winger! And your sidekick!"

"Objection!" Annie cried, forgetting everything else for a moment. 

"Sidekick slash lover," Chang said, conceding the point.

Annie gasped. "What Raven Midnight and Ricky Nightshade do behind closed doors is our own business!" It was the first thing that came into her head. "I mean, no, no, partner, not sidekick! Or just…" She let out a nervous chuckle, remembering where they were. "Just friend, you know. Friend is fine. We’re not currently lovers. Or ever. Ever lovers. Not up to this point. Not in the past, present... future… who knows? Too many variables. I’m flailing, help," she muttered to Jeff. He was standing next to her but not looking at her in the same way she wasn't looking at him.

"First off," Jeff said, his arms raised and his clear baritone commanding the attention of the room. "Pierce is not our leader."

Annie turned and goggled at him. This was not the issue she'd needed help with.

"We don’t have a leader!" Jeff told her defensively. "And if we did, it wouldn’t be Pierce, it’d be...well, it’d be one of _us_!"

"Okay, well, you’re not wrong," Annie said slowly. "I mean, yes, we don’t have a leader, and if we did…you’re the leader we don’t have. You have more of a leader vibe to you, and I’m not just saying that because you’re Ricky Nightshade, the cool hot magician all sexy in your vest, and I’m just Raven Midnight, your assistant..."

"Assistant slash lover," Jeff corrected. "Not that it's anyone else's business."

Annie smiled diffidently, accepting the edit, and started playing with her hair. For a half-second there she was just basking in his regard. But of course there was more to do. "Well, thank you. I think it’s fair to say," she continued, turning to Chang, "that Jeff is the leader we don’t have."

"Objection!" called Pierce, through cupped hands. "I never agreed to that!"

"What are you even doing here, Pierce?" Annie demanded. She knew the answer, of course, it was a key component of the elaborate heist.

Jeff was nodding. "You’re the getaway driver, you’re supposed to stay with the car!" 

"I got bored," Pierce explained with a slight note of condescension, as if this were obvious. "And I brought along my Carnac turban in case something like this happened—"

"In case you got bored?"

"Oh, my God." Still on his throne, Chang was rubbing his temples. "Guys, guys. What are we doing here? And Pierce, do you have an actual Carnac routine or are just here to get my hopes up and then dash them? On my birthday? Which is illegal, as you know."

Pierce drew himself up, suddenly miffed. "I have a routine, but you know what? Now I’m not going to do it. I’m not your monkey. Mo Rocca capering around in his bow tie."

"Nobody knows what you’re talking about, Pierce," Annie told him. "Let us finish our act. Jeff—Ricky Nightshade was in the middle of a card trick."

"Yeah, Pierce, let them—wait! Wait! Everybody shut up." Chang suddenly sat up and looked alert, or as alert as he ever did. "Why are you guys even here? You're risking arrest. Tell me you didn’t just come for my birthday party. I didn’t invite you, so, this is awkward. And if I was going to invite any of you people it would be Shirley, since I’m the father of her child."

Annie was shaking her head. "No, you’re not—"

Chang ignored her. "And maybe Abed and Troy. They’re fun! But you three? You’re _Britta-tier_."

Pierce gasped at the insult. Annie saw Jeff stiffen.

"So what are you doing here?" Chang asked them. "Is this part of some kind of, I don’t know, elaborate heist to rescue Dean Pelton from the dungeon I imprisoned him in when I replaced him with a dopple-Chang-er who, frankly, I don’t pay very much and whose loyalty I should probably be more concerned with? Is that what this is? Are you guys a distraction? Are you? Are you? I’m not asking rhetorical questions here, people!"

Annie exchanged another wordless glance with Jeff. Then they both looked back at Chang and nodded. "Pretty much," Annie said.

"How long has it been?" Pierce asked. "Did we stall him long enough?"

"Unclear," Jeff called back to him as Chang did a double take.

"Dammit," muttered Chang. His hand flew to the walkie-talkie on his belt. "You guys! Ugh. You suck. Joshua," he said into the walkie-talkie. "Come in, Joshua, this is the Supreme Leader, over."

The walkie-talkie squawked and emitted a burst of static that resolved itself into a boy’s voice. "Go for Joshua. Over."

Annie recognized Jordan’s voice, and relaxed very slightly.

"Stupid walkie-talkie, you sound like you’re in a tunnel taking a shower," grumbled Chang. "Is the golden goose still sleeping in the cat house, over."

"What? Uh, over."

Chang scowled. "Is the golden good still sleeping in the cat house, over, I said, over."

"I don’t know what you’re asking me. Over."

Jeff cleared his throat. "Should we just go?"

"Quiet, you!" Chang gesticulated wildly in their direction. "Guards! Guards! Seize these prisoners!"

As a dozen boys in their early teens approached, Annie took an involuntary step back. Jeff moved to cover her. "Oh, no. No, nobody’s seizing Annie, especially not any of these eighth-grade twerps."

"What’re you going to do about it?" Chang asked, his tone full of derision.

One of the boys turned away from Jeff and Annie, back towards Chang. "I dunno, man, he’s really big."

"He lifts weights!" Annie called, from behind the safety of Jeff’s back. He started to turn towards her, but stopped when she put a hand on the small of his back. She grinned, because she didn't feel like she was in any danger and there wasn't a reason not to. Jeff…well, he literally had her back. Or, technically, she literally had his and he figuratively had hers, but...

"Ugh!" Chang lifted the walkie-talkie back to his lips. "Listen, number one, go get everybody, bring everybody to the throne room. Boys _and_ girls," he added, with a dirty look towards Annie. "That’s right, I have female child soldiers, too."

"Very progressive of you, I approve," Pierce piped up.

Chang grunted. "But first. Joshua. Is the golden goose, that’s the dean, still sleeping, that means imprisoned, in the henhouse, that means the mechanical room under the cafeteria, over."

"Hold on, hold on," Jordan replied through the walkie-talkie. "I’m checking."

There was a protracted silence. Pierce made a show of stretching and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Annie considered removing her hand from Jeff’s body but decided against it, just for safety.

Finally Chang could wait no longer. "Well? Joshua?"

Jordan’s response was immediate. "You didn’t say over. I wasn’t done checking. Over."

Chang shot Jeff and Annie an exasperated _you see what I have to deal with_ look. "Are you done _now_ , over?"

"Yeah, yeah. He’s still there. Over."

Chang nodded, but then his eyes narrowed as a thought occurred to him. "Maybe you’re not really Joshua. What’s the secret password?"

"What?" The voice on the walkie-talkie sounded panicked. "I’m not Jordan!"

Chang scowled. "Okay, you know the secret password… but I’m still concerned. Over."

"Should we do a perimeter sweep? I thought you wanted everybody to the throne room. Over."

"Shut up, shut up, let me think! Yes, everybody here, I don’t know what they’re trying, maybe Annie has a bomb hidden in her décolletage. You should see her dress." Chang snickered at the walkie-talkie.

Annie was suddenly aware of the eyes of a dozen-plus teenage boys on her. She stepped slightly closer to Jeff, who seemed to be making himself wider somehow, and had reached back behind himself to place a hand protectively on her.

"If she does have a bomb… get everybody in here to check, really crowd around her. We need the girls too, to strip-search her. Behind closed doors, Winger!" Chang shot Jeff a murderous glare. "Everybody!" he repeated into the walkie-talkie.

There was another protracted silence. Jeff’s back was nice and all but Annie wished he were facing her.

Eventually, over the walkie-talkie, they all heard Jordan clear his throat. "Over?"

"Yes! Shut up!" Chang angrily slammed the walkie-talkie down. "I want to see the video feed! Bring me the video feed!"

Annie blinked, nonplussed, as a balding middle-aged man in a gray jumpsuit entered the throne room from some adjacent antechamber. "Hold your horses," he was saying as he ambled in. "I got it here, I got it right here."

"Hi Murray!" Pierce called to him.

The guy—Murray—glanced Pierce’s way. "Oh, hey. Troy’s friend. Yeah."

"You know this guy?" Jeff asked him.

"I know people." Pierce pointed at the guy. "This is the guy who installed the security lock on the door leading to the cafeteria basement. Murray."

"I’ve done other stuff," Murray grumbled. "It’s not like that’s my one claim to fame. I slew an ice basilisk one time. Installed solar panels on the roof of Building Six. You name it, I’ve done it."

"Don’t mean to denigrate your skills, Murray!" Pierce assured him.

Murray tsked. "So, what, you and these goths were trying a scheme, got caught? It happens. No skin off my nose," he told Chang. "You do whatever you want. Somebody needs to take a trip down troll way, you just say the word and I’ll pass it along to Vice-Dean Laybourne for approval."

"I don’t know what that means," Chang declared, "and I don’t want to have to learn, I didn’t become Supreme Leader so I’d have to learn stuff!" He turned his attention to the smartphone Murray was trying to show him. "Okay, so what’s…?"

"You have to…here." Murray fiddled with the phone for a second. From this distance Annie couldn’t see what was on it, plus she was still not-quite-clinging to Jeff. But Chang squinted at it for a moment before sitting back, satisfied. 

"Okay. Okay. Good. Crisis averted. I can see the dean on the video. Unless…" Chang’s eyes narrowed. Annie felt herself (and Jeff) grow tense. "Unless this is actually the duplicate dean, impersonating the real dean not to benefit me, but against me…"

Annie stepped slightly to one side, so that she could make a break for it if need be. She’d have to fight her way through the small army of young teenagers, but… She stopped short as Jeff threw an arm around her waist and pulled her closer. Okay, that worked. If things went south, Jeff would pick her up and carry her out.

She almost hoped things went south.

But instead Chang visibly relaxed. "Of course, he would never do that to me. The fake dean is totally loyal, even though I treat him badly, disrespect him to his face, refuse to let him off early, don’t bother to remember his real name…"

"Faux-by," Pierce said.

"No real person is named Faux-by, Pierce," Jeff told him.

"Anyway," Chang continued, shrugging away all concerns, "how’re we coming on those child soldiers? Everybody here?"

"Are we done?" Murray asked. Chang ignored him. "Okay, whatever. I’ll show myself out."

"Bye, Murray!" Pierce called. Murray ignored him.

Chang clasped his hands together as the last platoon of teenagers entered through the passage Murray had left by. "Okay, all my child soldiers are here. Good job, team. You can get back to all your guarding and perimeter securing and all the other stuff in a minute. I mean, what are the odds anybody is penetrating the holes in our security curtain right this second? They’d have to have planned for this whole scene in here to be going down, and I know I didn’t predict it. Which means nobody could have! But anyway, right now, bigger fish to fry. Child soldiers, march these prisoners to the secret secondary prison for political prisoners!"

As the teens surged forward, Pierce cleared his throat. "Here’s an alternative I’m going to offer," he said, addressing not Chang but the assembled adolescents. "How about instead you let us go and everybody gets a new PlayStation Vita? Just released! Like a Game Boy but better, I’m told. I’ve got a pile of them in the back of my car. I know a guy. Got ‘em wholesale."

"What? No! No!" Chang bellowed. A ripple of doubt passed through the crowd, growing to a big splash of disinterest in playing at being prison guards.

"This is getting boring anyway," one of the soldiers said.

"Yeah, and it’s not like he’s paying us," said another.

"I told you," Chang said desperately, "all the money is earmarked for other things! Thrones and ice cream cake and, listen, I didn’t draw up the budget, that was somebody else!"

Chang tried to restore some version of order but his magic spell was broken; where there had been a well-oiled, disciplined military machine, there was now just a bunch of sullen middle schoolers. 

Annie would have made a break for it if there was a way she and Jeff could have gone that wasn’t choked with adolescent bodies. As it was they were stuck.

"Follow me for handheld electronic games systems!" Pierce cried. He turned and marched out of the throne room, followed by a throng. 

Chang sat on his throne, visibly disgusted. "Fine, go!" he told his deserting army. "More ice cream cake for me!"

Annie and Jeff watched the teens file out, falling in behind them. If they could have slipped through the throng of bodies, they would have. Annie would have liked it on some level if Jeff had just picked her up and bulled his way through, but there were downsides to that.

Most of the way through the process, Chang stood up. "Hey!" he barked at the backs of the retreating teenagers. "I know you all have fourteen-year-old horny animal brains but you really think Hawthorne has sixty-odd Playstations in his car? Twenty, maybe, but sixty?"

The straggling last dozen or so guards slowed, turned, considered. Jeff tried to keep moving but had to stop.

Seeing he had their attention, Chang pressed his advantage. "You guys in the back are gonna get screwed! At best you’ll get a Hawthorne IOU which is worth less than the gay wipe it’s printed on. Stick with me and you at least get ice cream cake!"

"Jeff!" Annie hissed. "Say something!"

"Well, he’s not wrong," Jeff said slowly. "Although… Here, I can offer my solemn promise on my honor as a suspended attorney, I’ll see to it Pierce makes good on those IOUs."

"Yes!" Annie nodded fiercely. "You can trust us! I know we look very sketchy right now but actually I'm extremely trustworthy and honest--"

"You stole a prescription pad and forged your doctor's signature," Jeff muttered so only she could hear. "I mean, there were extenuating circumstances and you've grown since then, of course, but nevertheless—"

"Come on!" Annie turned to him, eyes wide with a mix of amusement and scorn. "Your fraud was _way_ worse than mine! You were disbarred!"

"Hey, _my_ mother still talks to me!"

"My mother didn't disown me, Jeff! _I_ disowned _her_ ! She _wishes_ she could talk to me!"

"Listen, most people, they see you all dolled up like this…" Jeff gestured to Annie's costume. "Yeah, we want to talk to you. I don't think it's reasonable to put your own mother in that category, though. That's weird and creepy."

"That's not at all what--you're twisting my words--weird and creepy? _I'm_ weird and creepy? Everything you've pulled over the years, and--"

"Guys!" Chang shouted at them through cupped hands. "We're in the middle of something here!"

Jeff and Annie broke off, remembering that the two of them weren't the only people in the world.

"Our point is, you can trust us," Annie told the blank-faced teens staring at them. "Ask anyone!"

"You can't!" Chang declared.

"Dude, I let you sleep on my couch and I reconciled you with your estranged wife," Jeff told thim, irritated. "Back me up, here."

"No! I'm the bad guy, here! I'm not helping you!"

"Listen," Annie told their audience. "He just said he was the bad guy!"

"You can’t trust them!" Chang countered. "They’re not even real magicians! He doesn’t have _any magic powers at all_!"

Nodding among themselves, the small knot of child soldiers raised their tasers threateningly at Jeff. Had they been carrying those this whole time? Annie didn’t remember seeing the tasers until now.

Chang gestured to the rear exit. "Minions, take them away! Then back here for ice cream cake!"

"Where are we taking them?" one of the boys asked.

"To the—ugh, I’ll just show you." Chang hopped down from his throne on its dais and led the way. It turned out to be an empty classroom just off the cafeteria.

"The door locks, it’s fine," Chang decided.

"This is a really dumb plan," Jeff told him as the kids frog-marched their prisoners into the classroom. "What are you going to do, keep us hostage?"

"No, dumbass!" Chang made a face. "I’ll just tell the cops you were sneaking onto campus. Which is illegal because you guys are banned! The cops’ll be here soon anyway."

Annie frowned. "But—"

"I’m just holding you in custody until the police come," Chang told her. "Citizen’s imprisonment! Like citizen’s arrest."

"Not a thing," Jeff said.

"Shut up!" Chang told him.

Annie tried to think of a way out. "Have you already called the cops?" she asked Chang.

"Don’t need to," Chang said confidently. "In like an hour the bomb in the basement will go off and blow up the furnace." He rubbed his fingers together. "It’s a little loophole in the furnace insurance policy I found. Chang’s one weird trick!"

Jeff stopped suddenly and Annie, still in the classroom doorway, almost walked into him. "There’s a bomb in the furnace?"

"In, near, whatever. It’s all fertilizer and blasting caps down there."

Annie and Jeff exchanged urgent glances. "You’ll blow up the building!"

"And everyone in it!"

"Including us!"

"And your ice cream cake!"

Mention of harm coming to his ice cream cake made Chang pause. Then he shook his head. "Nah." He slammed the classroom door. Annie heard a click as he locked it from the outside.

The two of them stood in stunned silence for a moment.

"Why does this classroom even lock from the outside?" Jeff asked no one in particular.

"Half the doors in this wing are like that," Annie said absently as she scanned the classroom. Dingy gray curtains covered the windows and the wall clock was stopped at 8:20. "That's Greendale for you." She nodded to herself. "Well, I guess we might die. You never think a particular fire code violation is going to cost lives until you're taken prisoner by a mad bomber. So…" She turned, to look Jeff in the eye. "So if there's anything you want to say to me, now's the time."


	7. Disused Classroom

Jeff sighed heavily. It had been an eventful few minutes. Dean Pelton was probably safe and out of the building along with their co-conspirators but there were still plenty of innocent bystanders who didn‘t deserve to get blown up by Chang‘s attempt at insurance fraud. Plus, he didn‘t deserve to get blown up, and Annie definitely didn‘t.

Rather than answer her question, Jeff turned and tried the door again. The lock rattled but held. Maybe he could kick it?

He glanced back at Annie, still standing behind him towards the middle of the empty room. Her arms were folded and her expression hard to read under the gothy makeup. She still looked insanely hot, the corset did amazing things for her already-impressive cleavage and the black-and-white color scheme emphasized her gigantic ice-blue eyes. None of that was relevant, though.

"I‘ll try kicking it, stand back," he said, knowing it was unnecessary but feeling like he should say something.

She didn‘t answer him until he‘d turned back to the door and started to position his foot in what he hoped would be an effective kicking stance. He'd done it once before, years ago. Also for Annie's sake.

"That‘s it? Stand back?" She sounded more disappointed than anything. Like she‘d expected more from him.

Given the life-threatening crisis, it didn‘t feel like an appropriate response. Was he missing something? He lowered his foot and turned back to her. "What?"

"I said, we might die, is there anything you want to say to me, and you said to stand back." Annie was almost…pouting? "I wasn‘t even very close."

"What?" he repeated. Then, because he still wasn‘t sure understood—she wasn‘t acting like it—"Annie, we might actually die."

She nodded angrily. "I know! I just said that! You really have nothing to say to me besides telling me to keep away from you? And repeating things I already said."

Jeff shook his head. "Annie, this isn‘t the right—We don‘t have the time…"

"Jeff!" she snapped. "We have plenty of time. Chang‘s party schedule had the magic show at four, ice cream cake at five, big explosive surprise TBA at six." She ticked the items off on her fingers, then rolled her eyes. "In retrospect we probably should have been suspicious about that one. Hindsight."

"You‘re being very glib about this." He scowled. He should have just turned away from her and kicked the stupid door, but he couldn‘t bring himself to turn his back on her when she so plainly wanted to talk. "Is there something you‘re expecting me to say? You look great in that dress. I feel like I already told you that. And you were great as Raven Midnight," he added sincerely. "Seven thumbs up, would assistant again."

She smiled tightly. "Thanks, but that‘s not what I was fishing for. You were great too, by the way. And, yes, everybody was very impressed by your abs."

He found he was smiling back. It had seemed like Annie _had_ been touching him more than strictly necessary to sell the bit. "Okay, see, that‘s what I was fishing for. So now can we move on? And escape?"

"No. Why haven‘t you asked me out?" Annie played with her fingers, suddenly nervous, not looking him in the eye. 

Jeff boggled. "This isn‘t—"

"I know, I know, this isn‘t the best time to talk about it but I feel like there‘s been something…building, lately. Going back to I don‘t know when. Start of the school year? Whenever I try to hint at it you deflect, or you don‘t seem to notice, and for a while I thought, okay, that‘s it, it‘s just in your head, you‘re reading too much into things, but then you kiss me in the dreamatorium again—not again," she amended quickly. "You kiss me and it‘s like, whoa, and then we‘re…whatever that was, the magic show, and you can‘t look me in the eye and tell me I‘m wrong. You _can‘t_ just say I‘m just making it up. Please? Please be honest." Annie‘s voice almost cracked, but didn‘t quite.

"Annie, I…" Jeff tried to think of a gambit that would table this whole topic until they were safely out of the building. For once he came up empty. "I don‘t know what to tell you."

"Tell me the truth!" she cried. "Or…" She sighed, and suddenly he felt like shit, all over again. "Or tell me I‘m wrong, I guess, and it‘s all just in my head. Crazy Annie again."

"It was never just in your head." Jeff sighed. This was important. This conversation had been a long time coming and he needed to get it right this time. "But relationships…there‘s a lot to consider. What we want, what we expect from others, what impact our choices and behaviors have on others."

"Blah blah blah," she replied, making the accompanying hand gesture. "What I‘m hearing is that you know you‘ve been jerking me around for ages and you‘re not even sorry."

"Oh, I‘m _real_ sorry!" Jeff paused to take a breathe. "That sounded sarcastic. Also sorry for that. Listen, I wish things were different, but… I feel like I‘d be taking advantage of you—"

"I‘m an adult, Jeff," she snapped. "I can buy liquor and everything."

"You‘re in your twenties, your early twenties, and I‘m in my early… early to mid thirties." She looked skeptical but he pressed on. "We‘re in different places—"

"We‘re both here now," said Annie, interrupting him, again. "I don‘t know what you want that‘s so different from what I want. Do you even know what I want? I had a crush on you for a long time. You were this cool grown-up handsome guy and you kind of liked me, you‘d do stuff if I asked, and, you know, I got over the crush. I did. Eventually. I just…I don‘t see why you think we can‘t. We‘re friends. Maybe best friends. Why can‘t we... take it a little further and see what happens?"

Jeff‘s mouth felt very dry. But he‘d basically rehearsed for this, many times. The speech he always told himself he _should_ have given her. "Because I would be bad for you."

"What?"

He looked down at his feet, unwilling to meet her eyes. "If we…get together…it couldn‘t just be a casual one-off thing." He didn‘t say _you‘re not Britta_ but he didn‘t have to. "I know, the way I feel about you, it couldn‘t just be casual. I would try to be your boyfriend, and every time I‘ve gone down that road it‘s been a shitshow. You end up hating me, all our friends pick you over me, except maybe Pierce…"

She didn‘t say anything. He risked a glance up, saw her staring at him, and wished she weren‘t wearing the mime makeup so he could, perhaps, read her expression even a little.

"That was a joke," he continued when it was plain she wasn‘t going to respond to his set-up line. "I know, you‘re young and strong…so strong, strong enough to get through what trying to date me would do to you, but…I‘m not strong enough to get through doing it to you."

"I don‘t believe you," she said flatly.

He winced. Scorn wasn‘t the response he‘d hoped for, but it was probably what he deserved. "Sure. That‘s fair. But I don‘t want you to hate me—"

"Nope." She silenced him with a raised hand. "I mean, I literally don‘t believe you. What you‘re saying? It‘s bull. You‘re looking at me and lying right now. Which is kind of a jerk move."

He scoffed. "I‘m lying to you when I say I don‘t want you to hate me?"

She made a sour face. "Of course not. But it‘s not the reason you pretended you didn‘t hear me when I tried to pick you up on my birthday, is it?"

"It is!" Jeff felt the wind go out of him, like he‘d been hit in the chest with a dodgeball during elementary-school PE. He shuddered, and tried to regain his composure. "I mean, I don‘t know what you‘re talking about. But it‘s all true."

"No," she said again. "I was thinking, just now, while you were saying a bunch of, ugh, I don‘t even know, obvious pablum… You know how to do card tricks." She took a breath, steeling herself before continuing. "You know how to do card tricks, and you have opinions about _Dungeons & Dragons_, and you know way more about comedies from the 1980s than most people—like, on par with Abed, and his whole thing is that he‘s a pop culture film nerd!" She laughed a little. 

"Okay," Jeff said uncertainly. "I‘m a man of many talents, it‘s true."

She stopped laughing. "You spend like two hours a day exercising and grooming and—and oiling yourself, I don‘t even…" She paused but started talking again before he could formulate a response. "And you have a nice car you can‘t really afford and you had a nice apartment you couldn‘t really afford until you _really_ couldn‘t afford it, and you wear nice clothes and you always wait to shave until after you‘ve extracted the maximum amount of handsome you can from the beard stubble, because you know you‘re at maximum hotness when you‘re stubbly, not when it‘s a real beard and not when you‘re totally clean-shaven, although looking at you now…" She shook her head, like she was trying to regain her train of thought, which Jeff couldn‘t help but find a little gratifying. He‘d had to shave that morning, to sell the Ricky Nightshade look.

"But that‘s just it," Annie continued with a wan smile. "You‘re scared that I‘m only attracted to the cool guy surface image you affect, the awesome sexy-man you pretend to be, and if I actually got to know you I‘d learn how insecure you are and how hard you have to work to pretend like it‘s all effortless, and that reminds me I think you might have undiagnosed dyslexia, like, some of the ways you approach study are textbook symptoms, at least I think so maybe but I‘m not an expert, you should look into it and if you think I might be right you should talk to somebody about it, and—" She was shaking, a little, and he suddenly had his hands on her arms, trying to steady and reassure her. At some point he‘d crossed the room towards her and he hadn‘t even noticed he was doing it.

"But I _do_ know you, you goof. So you‘re just scared of me finding out what I know already..." She trailed off as her arms wrapped around him. They hugged tightly, her cheek crushed into his bare chest, her gothy mime makeup probably smearing over his skin. Jeff could feel her heart pounding against his torso. "You think I‘m still the never-been-kissed nineteen-year-old, with the schoolgirl crush and the anxiety and I‘ll just melt whenever you say _milady_?" She delivered the last word in an attempt at a sexy baritone growl that made him grin to hear it.

"Hey," he murmured, too quiet for anyone who wasn‘t pressed against his chest to hear, "I seem to remember you pretty consistently melting, all _milord_ …" He tried for a high-pitched girlish gasp of excitement, and he could feel her smile at it.

"It's okay, you know," whispered Annie. "You tie yourself up in knots trying to avoid being miserable and all it makes you is unhappy. Just relax and accept that I'm not going anywhere. I know what I want, and I know I can trust you to always have my back, and…" She tugged at him in a way that probably would have gotten his mouth into kissing range of hers, if he wasn‘t a foot or more taller than she was. So he stooped down, to close the remaining gap, and let her press her palm into the back of his head. As they kissed he started stepping sideways, pulling her along with him, not stopping until they hit a wall. She let him lead her without protest or interruption of the kiss. Then they slid down against it until he was sitting on the floor and she was sitting in his lap. Her hands were on him, his hands were on her, and there was white gothy mime makeup just everywhere.

"You see?" Annie murmured after a while. "The world didn‘t end or anything."

He smiled at her, she smiled at him, and for a minute Jeff let himself feel like everything was right with the world, that the single biggest issue in his life (that Annie wasn‘t sitting in his lap letting him hold her in his arms) had been dealt with, finally, and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to getting his law license back, rebuilding his career, moving back into someplace nice, getting his car‘s 80,000-mile service done, the whole megillah. With Annie at his side he could do anything, they could do anything. They‘d demonstrated it before.

Then they both stopped smiling because they remembered more or less simultaneously that there was a bomb and an uncertain timeline.

"Annie, if we don‘t—"

"Hold that thought!" Annie squeezed his shoulder as she stood up and dashed lightly to the classroom door. She bent at the waist to examine the doorknob and lock up close (giving him more of an eyeful than she realized…or maybe she knew exactly what she was doing). "The thing about the doors in this wing," she began as she did something with that involved grabbing the knob with both hands and sliding her thumb along the doorplate, "is…"

The knob popped off in her hand, leaving a golf-ball-sized hole. As Jeff rose to his feet and approached, she stuck a thumb in the hole and tugged. She lost her balance and fell back on the butt he‘d just been admiring, as the door swung open.

She turned and grinned up at him, eyes bright. "Pretty good, huh?"

"That was…" Jeff was grinning, too. "So you knew we could walk out of here at any time and leveraged the threat of imminent death to get me to kiss you?" He knew he should be angry, or at least annoyed, but he couldn‘t stop grinning. He tried to regain his composure. "Okay, it seems like we‘re likely to live to face tomorrow after all, so, when we do, let‘s get dinner or something, okay?"

"Jeff Winger!" Annie extended a hand towards him. He took it, and helped haul her to her feet. "Are you asking me out?"

"Yes. Yes. I am asking you out," he said, and he didn‘t let go of her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, MAN do I love comments. I’m just saying, I love ‘em, can’t get enough.


	8. The Quad

"So that worked out," Troy said as he led his ragtag band of misfits away from the cafeteria building. They strode across the quad, almost in slow-motion, almost with triumphant music behind them: Troy, the Truest Repairman; Britta and Abed flanking him, both in cool sunglasses; Shirley, herding Jordan and Elijah and Craig Pelton the erstwhile dean and prisoner; and also Pierce was there. They were too spread out for a real group shot, though, with Shirley and her crew lagging back due to general disinterest.

"That worked out," Troy repeated thoughtfully. "Kind of feel like we forgot something, though."

Behind him, Britta frowned. "Jeff and Annie? I’m sure they’re fine."

"Yeah, those two can take care of each other, even if both struggle to take care of themselves," Abed declared.

"They’re probably…Speak of the devil. Jeff! Annie!" Troy waved as he spotted the pair emerge from a side door. Then he grinned when they ran up to him and fell into step. "I know what you guys have been doing." He eyed them up and down.

"What?" they asked in unison, and exchanged a nervous glance. Annie winced, realizing. She must have been pretty distracted not to have noticed.

Jeff was baffled, though. "Seriously, what--"

"Face!" Annie hissed, pointing at her own.

After glancing at Annie’s expression of concern, Jeff pulled out his phone and fiddled with a moment. "Oh," he said, seeing his image in the phone’s camera’s mirror view. "Uh…."

"There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Jeff’s face and chest are smeared with my mime makeup," Annie said.

"You were making out." Troy chuckled.

"That does seem like the most reasonable explanation," Britta agreed. Her eyes narrowed. Troy couldn't actually see them narrow, what with Britta's cool sunglasses, but he could tell it had happened from her tone of voice and the way she hunched down slightly. Britta's _judging pose_ ; Troy knew it well. "Hey," she said, "this morning in the dreamatorium, were—"

"Ha!" Annie tried to laugh it off but it came out more like a bark. "Yes, Britta, it’s fine, ha ha, it’s all fine! We were, um, we were..." She glanced at Jeff for support.

He was watching her and smiling in that way he sometimes did at her. Seeing her silent demand for help, he shrugged. "We were making out."

"Okay, yes, fine." Annie tossed her hair, like this was no big deal and why was Britta even making a thing out of it?

"So you _were_ secretly dating!" cried Britta, delighted. "That explains the so-called birthday dinner last night! I bet your birthday isn’t even in April!"

"It is and it was!" Jeff protested.

"Oh, happy birthday, man," Troy said.

"Many happy returns," chimed in Abed.

Britta scoffed. "This explains _that_ , and this morning—"

"What happened this morning?" Abed asked.

"Just some K-I-S-S-I-N-G!" Britta punched the air.

Annie rolled her eyes. "What are you, five?"

"This explains that thing when she texted you about the yams, and that time at Annie’s birthday, and last week at the coffee shop, and that time in the cafeteria, and…" Britta was ticking off events on her fingers.

"I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about with most of that," Jeff told her.

"Don’t worry, nobody does," Abed declared.

"This is a very new thing," Jeff continued, "and, who knows, maybe it isn’t going to last once the initial rush wears off…"

"You don’t think?" Annie asked wryly as she handed him a wipe she’d procured from somewhere.

He smiled at her and she smiled at him and they just stood there for a second. Troy and Abed and Britta paused, standing there awkwardly, long enough for the stragglers of Troy’s group to catch up.

"Might as well start picking out wedding china," Troy muttered under his breath, hopefully loud enough for Abed and/or Britta to hear but not Jeff or Annie. Nobody reacted so maybe he'd been too quiet.

After a moment Britta got tired of waiting and poked at Jeff. He started wiping white makeup off himself with the wet-nap.

"What’s happening?" Shirley asked as she and her kids caught up to the rest of the group.

"Jeff and Annie are a thing now," Abed said, pointing first at Jeff, then at Annie, as though he thought Shirley might have forgotten who was who.

"Oh, right, right, right." Shirley nodded with the affect of someone who had just been reminded of something they’d absolutely, definitely already known, it had just slipped their mind. "Well, I’m sure you don’t want everybody looking over your shoulder."

And then Craig was there, still wearing his chinos and his necktie and nothing else, which was a look, no doubt about it. Not a look Troy would have recommended, but still, as with so much about Craig, it was a choice.

"Jeffrey!" Craig shouted, much more loudly than necessary, and threw his arms around the larger man’s torso, pressing his face against Jeff’s chest in an unwitting mirror of Annie’s earlier action.

Jeff clucked his tongue. "Uh…" He caught Annie’s eye (or maybe they'd just maintained eye contact throughout) and winked at her before carefully prying the dean off.

"I knew you would come save me," Craig murmured. "So heroic."

This was fun and all, but… Troy cleared his throat. "We should probably keep moving—"

"The bomb!" Annie shouted, pointing at him. "I forgot to tell everyone! Someone--they set us up in a classroom? That’s not important, the bomb!"

"The bomb, yeah." Troy nodded. "I took care of it."

Annie did a double take.

"There’s a bomb in the furnace of the cafeteria building," Jeff said, his serious tone somewhat undercut by the way he was fending off Craig’s attempts to hug him some more. "We need to evacuate—"

"I took care of it, I said." Troy let out a satisfied sigh, pleased with himself for once. "I pay attention, you know? People think I don’t, but I do. I pay attention. Some teacher told me once, she said, 'Troy, pay attention!' and I took it to heart. I listened to Teacher. I paid attention. I dunno why more people don’t. I don't know why people choose to live the way they do. Not paying attention? It's not my thing. That’s just how I do things. I pay attention. I get stuff done."

Jeff and Annie turned to Britta. "There’s a bomb—"

Britta silenced them with an emphatic gesture. "Troy took care of it! He did!"

"Chang left his walkie on," Troy explained. "We passed the info on to Jerry, who, funny story, said the annex guys already knew about it? Anyway they disarmed it. No bomb."

The assembled group had slowed in their march. Now they stood in the quad, a wide long open yard between buildings. Shadows were lengthening and the tracks of landscape lighting along the sidewalks hadn't turned on yet, but they would soon. Out on the grass Jordan and Elijah were running in wide looping circles around Pierce, for some reason. It was just starting to turn to dusk, and there was a blueness to the air, and the temperature was just perfect.

"You know," Jeff began. Everybody shifted where they stood, settling in for a speech. "Sometimes we—"

He was interrupted by a shriek from the direction of the cafeteria. "Black magic!" Chang was shouting as he led a couple of guys towards them with pointing and shrieking. "The dark arts! Foul, _foul_ sorcery!"

"Hey-o!" One of the guys waved, and Troy recognized him as one of the members of Greendale's board. Total blank as to the guy's name. "How's everybody doing tonight?"

"Yeah, yeah, these are the guys," Chang said as they closed the gap and joined Troy, Britta, Abed, Jeff, Annie, Shirley, and Craig. "I'd recognize them anywhere from their dorky haircuts!"

"Hey!" Jeff's hand flew to his scalp and he seemed to realize he was still wearing the Ricky Nightshade wig. Troy tried his best not to snicker as Jeff quietly removed the wig.

"Arrest them!" Chang demanded of the board.

"What? Uh, pal, we don't have powers of arrest," one of the board members told him.

"Wait, are we sure we don't?" asked the other. He glanced at Annie, perhaps noticed she was clinging to an enormous shirtless man, and then turned to Britta. "You're under arrest on suspicion of maybe being slutty enough to trade drinks, food, and-slash-or drugs for sex!"

"Hey!" Now it was Britta's turn to bark indignantly.

Troy smoothly stepped between Britta and the creep. "Okay, I'm sure this is some misunderstanding—"

"Right, sorry." The creep nodded apologetically to Britta. "I was trying to say, like, arrests aside, I want to pay you for sex."

Troy chuckled and put one hand on Britta's arm, telepathically requesting she not punch this creep. "Buddy," he said to the creep, putting as much friendly smile into his voice as he could, "free advice, you need to rethink your mouth noises because you sound like a guy who wants to be pounded."

The creep blinked, nonplussed, and looked around the group. When he saw his fellow white guys (Jeff, Craig technically) scowling, he took a couple of steps back.

"Great!" Troy exclaimed, relieved that today was not the day he was going to be shot by a cop. Britta was looking down at her feet, probably embarrassed by the whole scene. She glanced at him shyly, almost as though she'd never had anybody bodily interpose himself between her and a harasser before. Which was absurd, she'd lived in New York, so--

"Bree-yark!" Chang's incoherent shriek broke Troy's train of thought. "We're getting away from the important part, which is that these guys--and their leader, Pierce Hawthorne over there--wrecked my birthday party!"

"Hey Pierce!" The less creepy member of the board waved at him. Pierce waved back but didn't approach. He seemed to be enmeshed in some kind of tag variant with Jordan and Elijah.

Craig cleared his throat. "Well, fellas," he said to the board, "it's like this. Ben Chang here kidnapped me and replaced me with a double, with whom he conspired to defraud the school of, oh, I don't even know how much money—"

"Pshaw! Is it _fraud_ to use college funds to buy nice things for yourself, _if_ , let me finish, you really want them?" Chang demanded.

"It is," Shirley said.

"Definitely," agreed Annie.

"The two smartest people I know say yes," Troy told Chang.

Jeff, Britta, Craig, and Abed all made little disappointed squeaks.

"You're all smart in different ways," Troy told them, which was a stretch for some of them but it was what Craig and Jeff needed to hear, he figured.

"Jeez, this is a lot to process," said the creep. "I thought we were just here for the open bar."

"It's a cash bar, actually," Chang said. "Speaking of, you owe me eleven hundred dollars. That includes a twenty percent gratuity and a ten percent finder's fee."

"Yeah, so, you're saying that when we fired you for gross mishandling of the school's budget, that wasn't you, that was somebody else?" the less creepy one asked the dean.

"Exactly! Now you understand." Craig nodded.

"What? No, you guys fired him and appointed me the new dean," Chang told the board members.

"That doesn't sound like something we'd do," the less creepy one mused.

The creep made a drinky-drink gesture. "On the other hand…"

Suddenly all the lights in the quad came on at once, including some rooftop floodlights that Troy had definitely never seen on before. They were dazzling, shining down from several adjoining buildings, blinding him and, judging by the way they all seemed to be flailing, everybody else. Troy grabbed Abed's hand — wait, no, it wasn't Abed, it was… Britta? Yeah, Britta. Good enough, Troy decided, and anyway Abed grabbed his other hand.

The windows at ground level on all the nearby buildings were shining brightly, mirrors reflecting the hidden floodlamps such that the light seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Slowly Troy's eyes adjusted well enough for him to make out his friends.

Then a massive shape coalesced from the blackness behind the light, just a few feet away. Vice-Dean Laybourne, looking as big as a house and twice as deadly.

Troy scowled, because his interior monologue hadn't made any sense for a second there, houses weren't deadly, but Laybourne was talking and he needed to pay attention to keep up.

"Mister Barnes alerted us to a series of code violations perpetrated by Mister Chang, here," Laybourne said in his coffee-dark baritone. He was a massive slab of a man, like the Kingpin as illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz. Oh, now those were some comics. Troy wrenched his attention back to the matter at hand, Laybourne was still talking. "Of which we were largely already aware, of course, but nevertheless prudence dictated action."

The creep squinted. "Huh?"

"The annex guys saved the school," Troy explained.

"Well, you saved the school," Britta told him. "I mean, okay, yeah, but getting them to save the school was your idea! So you deserve the bulk of the credit."

Troy shrugged. "I don't think so."

"Ugh, he's so humble!" shouted somebody behind Laybourne. "Charming, sweet, humble, too! The Truest Repairman!"

"Quiet, Telly!" Laybourne called over his shoulder. He chuckled nervously. "No need to belabor the point. I'm willing to accept the onus and reins of authority in this instance."

The creep squinted again. "Huh?"

"Someone needs to be in charge, and that someone is me," Laybourne said. "I'll tell you what to do."

The creep nodded sagely. "Ah, carry on."

"He's so authoritative," Craig murmured wistfully.

"Benjamin Chang is hereby fired from the college staff, and exiled from the campus," Laybourne intoned. "That sentence will be suspended on the condition of Chang's good behavior for…" Laybourne paused, as if to do some math. "Five years, during which time he will labor in the ice caves for the wizard's tribute."

"Wait, what?" asked the less creepy board member.

The creep elbowed him. "Shut up, man, you want to be stuck making choices?" He turned to Laybourne. "That all sounds great. Wizard's tribute, sure. You air conditioning guys are so kooky."

"Kooky, yes," Laybourne rumbled. "We like to play our little games."

"Wait," said Britta. "Wait! Everybody wait! What kind of star chamber bullshit is this?"

"Chamber? Babe, we're outside…" Troy cast his eyes up towards where the stars would be, if it was night instead of dusk and if he wasn't dazzled by floodlights. "Huh, star chamber. Very colorful expression. Poetic."

Britta huffed. "I mean, this is nonsense! Nobody has to labor for wizard's tribute! Not anymore! We had a civil rights movement! This is America!"

"Technically the campus is not US soil!" Telly called from behind Laybourne.

"Shut it, Telly!" Laybourne called back.

"He tried to kill people! He commited all kinds of crimes! We should—" Britta stopped suddenly. "Sorry, I can't make myself say we should call the cops. But I'm thinking it, okay? I'm thinking it _loudly_!"

There was an awkward silence.

"She makes a good point," Troy said slowly. "Chang did do crimes."

"And he will be punished appropriately," asserted Laybourne.

"Well, who are you to sit in judgement, dude?" Britta demanded.

"Quiet, wench!" Laybourne cried, which seemed kind of out of character. He was rattled, Troy realized, from having his authority questioned. Which meant that he was pushing the edges of his authority, probably.

"Wench?" Britta straightened up, like she was going to throw herself at Laybourne, but then she stopped, maybe (Troy was just guessing here) because she realized Laybourne was backed up by an unknown number of annex guys, including Telly.

Telly.

"Hey!" Troy barked. "You don't call people wenches! It's 2012! Obama's in the White House! Things are looking up for America for once! Get with the times!"

Behind Troy, Jeff leaned down to whisper to Annie. "I'm completely in the dark here, plus I can't really see because of these lights. Do you know what's going on?"

"Nope," Annie muttered back. "I got nothing."

They said other things to each other but Troy didn’t catch them, because Vice-Dean Laybourne was shouting at him, "Who are _you_ to rebuke _me_? I, who have mastered the caverns of endless ice and trysted with the queen of the ice trolls! I, who have dwelled in the house in the sky! I, who ground the focusing lenses aboard the _real_ space station! I, who—"

"I am the Truest Repairman!" Troy shouted back. It felt right. "I am the repairer of men, come to fix this broken system as we fix all broken systems, by cleaning what is dirty and replacing what cannot be repaired!"

There was a rumble from the dark behind the floodlights, which it took Troy a moment to process as a couple of dozen people all going _ooh_ at once like a live studio audience.

"You really set him up for that!" Troy heard Telly shout.

Troy could hear the exasperation in Laybourne’s voice. "You may _claim_ to be the Truest Repairman, Mister Barnes, but—"

"I claim nothing!" Troy shouted. "I state fact! Let any who doubt my claim either renounce their doubts, or else…" He thought frantically. These guys were weirdos, how would weirdos resolve disputes? "Else face me in ritual combat in the star chamber!"

"Sun chamber," Laybourne corrected.

"Whatever chamber!" Troy shouted. "Maybe you guys got the name wrong, not me! Ever think of that?"

"Hey, what’s...what’s happening?" Pierce had finally joined the group, Jordan and Elijah in tow. "Why’re all these lights on? Who’s shouting? I can’t see anything!"

Abed cleared his throat. "Troy," he said, pointing at Troy in case Pierce had forgotten who Troy was, "is challenging the head of the air-conditioning repair annex for supremacy."

"He’s the guy who looks like a refrigerator," Britta said.

"I understand," Pierce said, in the tone of someone who didn’t.

"Also, Annie and Jeff are a thing, now," Britta added.

"That’s old news, Britta," Abed told her shortly. "Try to keep up."

There was some kind of disturbance going on up on the rooftops. The annex guys were debating amongst themselves, maybe.

With the lights shining, Troy couldn’t read Laybourne’s face, but when he spoke there was a sliver of uncertainty under his confidence. "If I were to indulge every young journeyman who sought to make a splash by challenging me to a duel—"

"I am no journeyman!" Troy hated interrupting but it really did seem called for. "Who stands before you but the Truest Repairman? Dare you command _me_ to bend the knee?"

He heard Britta let out a little gasp, but when he glanced her way she was smiling at him. At least, he thought she was, it was hard to tell with the glare of the lights and her cool sunglasses. Meanwhile the rooftop murmuring grew stronger.

"You know what? I don’t need this." Laybourne sounded much less majestic and much more exasperated. "I have an indefinite amount of vacation time coming to me, maybe I’ll just use it and take that trip to Bermuda my wife was always talking about until she left me. This whole thing? It’s getting silly and stupid. You want to parade around like you’re the Truest Repairman? And you all want to let him? Be my guest! I don’t need this! I don’t need this," he repeated, and stomped off, pushing past several people.

The floodlights dimmed and Troy could make out Murray, Telly, Jerry, and others, milling around behind where Laybourne had been.

"So, what, the kid is the new vice-dean?" Murray asked uncertainly.

Troy started to shake his head but Britta grabbed his shoulder. "That’s right!" she shouted. "I don’t know what that means, but that’s right!"

"Hurray!" Telly cheered. "The Truest Repairman, now Vice-Dean Barnes!"

"I really don’t understand," Troy could hear Jeff mutter to Annie, behind him. "Doesn’t the board have to approve that kind of hiring decision?"

"You’d think?" Annie shrugged—Troy couldn’t see it, but it was in her voice.

"Okay, well." The creep was looking around helplessly. "What now?"

"You’re the new annex guy, right?" The less creepy one said to Troy. "What do we do with Chang?"

"And I guess he’s hired," Jeff marveled quietly. "Good for him."

"He committed a bunch of deeds, right? Crimes? So—wait, where’d he go?"

"Ben? He ran off," Murray said. "Like, minutes ago. As soon as the lights came on."

"You want us to send the assassins after him?" Jerry asked.

"Is that a colorful turn of phrase, or does Troy now have ninjas at his disposal?" Abed asked.

"Can it be both?" Jerry suggested.

"No! No ninjas!" Troy threw up his hands. "I’ve seen ninja movies, it looks like fun but somebody always ends up hurt or thrown through a window and then there’s glass everywhere and kids might play there, man!"

"All right, whatever," the creep said. "I was gonna say, let’s not get Johnny Law involved, because then there’d be media attention and frankly we’re better off if most of the greater metro area thinks we closed down years ago."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," agreed the less creepy one. "We just need to sweep all this under the rug, get back to normalcy."

"Maybe not _normalcy_ ," Annie proposed.

"No, no, I like this sweeping imagery," Craig said. "I can do that. I can sweep with the best of them."

"Great," said Troy quickly. He wasn’t going to squander an opportunity to move the conversation forward and everybody else seemed very easily sidetracked. "You’re re-hired."

"Cool!" Craig clapped his hands together. "Is there any other business? Shirley, you’ve been quiet…Shirley?"

Shirley had left at some point, it turned out. There were texts in the group chat about kids’ bedtimes. While they were sorting that out, Jeff and Annie disappeared, too, with a text in the chat about "kids’ bedtimes" in quotation marks, which, gross.

"I do have one more announcement," Pierce said, addressing the group (which, for those not keeping track, at this point was Troy, Britta, Abed, the two guys on the board whose names Troy didn’t know, Craig the former and current dean of the school, and an indeterminate number of air-conditioning repair technicians). "This whole semester has been something of a wake-up call for me, I’ve been taking classes at Greendale for years now, and I have to say, when I was expelled, I didn’t miss it. So, I’m going to graduate now. Manga cum laude, with a degree in, uh, what’s hip…marketing? Marketing."

"Generally you can’t just declare yourself graduated," Abed said quietly. "There are requirements."

Craig shrugged. "I think in this case we can make an exception. Pierce has more than enough credits built up."

"Can I get in on that?" asked Britta eagerly.

Craig sucked in air quickly, let it out slowly. "So, the thing is, we really want to keep our accreditation…"

"We can re-admit you guys, though," the less creepy one suggested. "Un-expel you."

"They were expelled?" The creep was scandalized.

"Don’t worry about it," Troy told him, and the creep visibly relaxed.

"Yeah…" Craig mulled this over. "You’ll have to redo this semester. I’m sorry, guys, but I can’t just hand out course credits. Believe me, I’ve tried."

"If you’re done taking classes, Pierce," the less creepy one said, "have you considered joining the board? We’ve been a man short for, like, eight or nine years."

"Oh, hey, yeah!" Troy perked up. "Can we replace this guy with Pierce?" He pointed at the creep.

"What? What’d I do?" The creep sounded hurt.

Troy frowned. "You sexually harassed Britta."

"What?" Suddenly the creep was the picture of wide-eyed innocence. "No! Who is that?"

The less creepy one sighed. "You have to understand, he has the memory of a goldfish. He’s supposed to take medicine for it but he forgets."

"Also you can’t mix it with booze," the creep added. "So it’s just a non-starter. What were we talking about?"


	9. Epilogue

EPILOG

"You know," Jeff said as casually as he could, "I don’t think I’ve ever been in here before."

They were sprawled on Annie’s bed, in her room in apartment 303. It was only a twin bed, so for them both to fit Annie had to be more or less on top of Jeff, which neither of them minded. He could see them reflected, entwined together in Annie's vanity mirror. They looked good.

"Haven’t you?" Annie asked him as he hugged her tightly. "Huh," she said, thinking it over. "I guess you haven’t."

"There are some boundaries I just didn’t trust myself to cross," Jeff said thoughtfully. "Being alone with you in a room with a bed was definitely one of them."

Annie laughed a little. "Well, welcome to Annie’s room, population nine. I’d give you the tour but you’ve already seen everything—" She broke off as Jeff grabbed at her.

"Wait," he said a few minutes later. "Population nine?"

"Oh, you know, there’s me, and Mister Tickles, and Ruthie, and Count Frogula, and Hilary Rodham Kitten, and Nathan, and Mark Buffalo, and Patsy, and…" She trailed off when she saw his look. "What?"

Jeff sighed. "Nothing."

"Jeff, I have stuffed animals."

"I know."

"Yeah! You knew that this morning, it’s not news now!"

"I just need a second to process the full reality of it."

"You play _Dungeons & Dragons _with Neil on Thursdays," Annie pointed out. "Which, by the way, is a secret I’ve kept, because you asked me to not tell anyone."

"Yeah."

"Because you think Britta would make fun of you. Or Abed would want to join, or, I don’t even know."

"It’s just a thing," Jeff said wearily. "I told _you_ about it. Why are we talking about this?" He grabbed at her but instead of letting him, Annie shifted away from him and sat up, straddling his lap. He could feel the weight of her in the middle of his chest, where she was supporting herself with one hand.

Annie looked down at him from this perch. Her voice was solemn but her eyes were smiling. "If you can pretend to be a gnome, I can have stuffed animals."

He tried to match her tone and nodded like she was telling him national security secrets. "Okay."

"A couple of these I’ve had since I was a baby." She slid back down mostly off of him, wedging herself between him and the wall of her bedroom. "I can’t sleep without…" Annie yawned as she rested her head on his shoulder.

"Without Ruthie, I know." Jeff shifted his arm under her, so he could wrap it around her.

She made a pleased little hum at that, and snuggled her whole body into his. "Love me, love my stuffies."

"Okay," Jeff said. He lay on his back on Annie Edison’s bed, staring up at her ceiling, and felt her draped over him, close enough to feel her breath. He smiled. "Okay."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! As always, I love comments and kudos a tremendous amount. Thanks to Amrywiol, Bethanyactually, and Raj_Sound for beta reading portions of this. "Remedial Learning!" may or may not continue, I dunno yet.


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